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COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 



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GIRLS AND EDUCATION. 

ROUTINE AND IDEALS. 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND CHARACTER, 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



GIRLS AND EDUCATION 



GIRLS AND EDUCATION 



BY L. B. R. BRIGGS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
19H 



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V 



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COPYRIGHT, 191 1, BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October zqii 



©CI.A300l3i 



TO MY DAUGHTER 



CONTENTS 

I. TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD CUL- 
TIVATE HERSELF I 

II. TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT GRADUATION 29 

HI. TO COLLEGE GIRLS 7^ 

IV. COLLEGE TEACHERS AND COLLEGE 

TAUGHT 117 



TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 



TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 

For a clever boy, no matter how 
poor, to rise as a man to his own level 
is so common, especially in America, 
as to excite no comment. His level 
may be that of the uncultivated rich, 
the self-made man of business, or 
that of the literary scholar: whatever 
it is, if he has energy, courage, and 
a fair chance, he reaches it. All this 
may be true of a girl; but a girl sel- 
dom gets what a boy would call, in his 
own case, a fair chance. In most of 
the learned professions she is still 
eyed with disfavor; in the effort to go 
to college she has many more sympa- 
thizers than of old, but few who feel 
that a college training is for her a ne- 



4 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

cessity ; in business, beyond steno- 
graphy, typewriting, and such other 
subjects as are taught at commer- 
cial schools and paid for by small 
or moderate salaries, she can rarely 
compete with men. There is no get- 
ting round the fact that a girl is a 
girl, and that as such —whatever her 
courage and her cleverness — she is 
hampered in the rough struggle 
for advancement, distinction, and 
wealth. A few women of exceptional 
attainments and privileges earn large 
salaries; but compared with those 
who marry people that earn large 
salaries their number is insignifi- 
cant. Through marriage or inherit- 
ance most women win such material 
wealth as they possess, and with it 
such opportunities for culture and 
intellectual pleasure as well-spent 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 5 

wealth affords. Yet in our country an 
unmarried girl, with only her own 
efforts to support her, may lift her 
life above its drudgery and may be- 
come in greater or less degree a cul- 
tivated woman. I assume that she 
has fair health, though many girls 
not physically strong do what I have 
in mind. The principal requisites 
are common sense and courage. 

Common sense, like humor, is a 
saving quality, showing its possessor 
what not to do, as well as what to do; 
and by it all ambition may fitly be 
tested. No girl can learn too early 
that there is a vast difference between 
feeling too big for a place and being 
too big for it, and that feeling too big 
for one's work and surroundings sel- 
dom if ever results in culture. Rather 
it breeds discontent, vanity, idle- 



6 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

ness, and not infrequently vice. 
Sometimes it is accompanied by a 
dull persistency which achieves the 
means without the end. No just per- 
son will deny the merit, or even the 
success, of the intelligent dull, or 
will fail to see in their success hope 
for himself and the race; but every 
just person of experience will beware 
of artificially lifting the unintelligent 
dull to a level above their own, a 
level at which they cannot be main- 
tained without constant '* boosting." 
' * It is better to be a good dyer than 
a poor preacher," said a shrewd 
gentleman to an ambitious naill- 
hand whose quality he suspected. 
The ministry offers a startling illus- 
tration of the danger in tempting 
men by large scholarships and the 
hope of social respectability to a life 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 7 

for which their sole fitness is a kind 
of negative virtue. ** He ought never 
to go into the ministry," said a dis- 
tinguished clergyman of a youth 
helped through college by a scholar- 
ship of three hundred dollars a year 
because of his ministerial purpose. 
*' Why not?" I asked, ^^sn't he a 
good fellow?" " My dear sir," was 
the answer, *' the church is cursed 
with good people." The minister's 
work, as every efficient minister 
knows , needs men that are filled with 
manly life, men of wisdom, of in- 
stinctive — not professional — sym- 
pathy, men of fearless leadership, 
men of power ; and no other profes- 
sion has suffered so much from the 
artificial infusion of weaklings. The 
teacher's profession suffers similarly, 
though less. ' ' I do not believe," said 



8 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

an able graduate of a college for wo- 
men, **in taking a girl out of her 
mother's kitchen, where she is of 
some use, and giving her scholar- 
ships to make her a second-rate 
school-teacher." Gifted Hopkins, in 
Dr. Holmes's ''Elsie Venner," was 
born to sell tape and to write verses 
for the local newspaper. These were 
decent, honorable occupations from 
which the effort to rescue him for 
higher things would have come to a 
humiliating end. Thus the girl who 
has a right to rise and who rises to 
some purpose is she who, not mis- 
taking vanity for refinement, uses 
her woman's sensitiveness in doing, 
not in avoiding, her daily work; who 
sees in that work, however mean, 
something great and divine, and by 
the light that never was on sea or 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 9 

land, is led from the common things 
which it glorifies into intimate com- 
munion with those who have shed 
the glory upon the painted canvas or 
the printed page. Her state of mind 
is as far as possible from mere un- 
leavened restlessness. *' Restlessness 
without a purpose," says Phillips 
Brooks, ** is discontent ; with a pur- 
pose, progress." Of the thousand 
men and women that we see on every 
holiday hanging to the electric cars 
or dragging themselves and their 
children through the crowded street, 
few gain rest and refreshment ; most 
are squandering time and strength 
and money in the excitement of dis- 
contented motion. They, too, have 
achieved a means without an end, 
activity without progress. One of the 
first lessons for a girl (as for any one 



10 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

else) is the lesson of doing faithfully 
and heartily the work that is before 
her, of growing by doing it, not by 
neglecting it, of fitting herself for big 
tasks, so far as she is capable of them, 
by doing her own little tasks in a 
big way, not by shirking them as 
unworthy of her gifted and aspiring 
soul. **They tell me," said one of 
the stupidest and laziest and weakest 
men I have ever met, ' * that I should 
be a good deal of a man if I lived in 
a different kind of a place " ; and with 
this in mind he became less than half 
a man where he did live. If you have 
dishes to wash and want to read 
poetry, wash the dishes first. I have 
known servant girls with consider- 
able education and culture; but I 
do not count among these the girl 
whose mistress, seeing, in the mid- 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 11 

die of the morning, that the beds 
were not made, discovered her lying 
on a bed with a novel in her hand. 
Granted that a girl does her work 
in the right spirit, she has still a good 
deal of time to herself. It may come 
in long stretches or in odd minutes ; 
but even in odd minutes it is pre- 
cious. The girl who makes the most 
of herself is she who first does her 
work generously, and next uses her 
odd minutes well. To use them at all 
requires flexibility and concentra- 
tion , qualities that seldom come with- 
out urging, but qualities that insure 
efficiency. To hold your attention 
fixed on one thing and, when that is 
done, to fix it instantly on another 
and hold it there as if the first had 
never been — this is what every 
active life demands and what few 



n TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

human creatures can adequately sup- 
ply : yet something like this is in the 
power of us all ; and we should work 
for it as we value helpfulness and 
happiness. The best training for it 
is the simple habit of industry. 

For the girl who would cultivate 
herself, the natural resource in odd 
minutes is reading. By reading fif- 
teen minutes a day, it is said, a per- 
son may become cultivated. Most 
girls read more than that ; but most 
girls are not cultivated. What do 
most girls read ? 

Here I come to one of the melan- 
choly aspects of human nature in 
general, if not of feminine nature in 
particular. Ruskin's question, ''Do 
you know that if you read this, you 
cannot read that? " is so simple that 
it seems to slight the hearer's in- 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 13 

telligence ; yet it is justified by the 
persistent unin telligence of the read- 
ing world. With one Hfe to live, with 
each day, and each minute, when it 
is gone, gone forever, we read the 
illustrated scandals of eloping cho- 
rus girls or of their kinswomen in 
high life at Newport or New York. 
Beyond this, we read the fiction of 
the day whether in magazines or nov- 
els ; and we get it no longer at our 
own cost from such circulating libra- 
ries as filled the empty head of Lydia 
Languish, but from free public hbra- 
ries given, it may be, to the people 
by generous men and women who 
have thought to educate thereby the 
neighbors and friends of their youth 
— temptation offered in the name 
of culture to those who eagerly ac- 
cept the offering. Fiction is a fine 



14 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

art and as truly an instrument of cul- 
ture as music or painting ; but de- 
based fiction is scarcely more culti- 
vating than the song of the vaudeville 
specialist or the chromo awarded to 
the preserver often soap wrappers. 
The stage, too, is an instrument 
of culture ; but the stage has pro- 
duced both Shakspere and theRogers 
Brothers. 

I can readily understand the 
state of mind that makes intelligent 
*' solid" reading difficult if not im- 
possible . A girl who has stood all day 
behind the counter of a '* stuffy" 
shop may lack the nervous vigor for 
philosophy or political economy or 
for any history not narrative and 
romantic. To such a girl relief and 
delight may justly come through 
fiction ; and with them may come the 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 15 

beginning of culture. No intelligent 
girl can read '' The Newcomes" or 
* * Pendennis " or ' * Henry Esmond " 
or ' * Vanity Fair" without some share 
in the joys and sorrows and sympa- 
thies of that great mind and greater 
heart which conceived them all ; with- 
out some inward sense, however ru- 
dimentary, of what it means to say 
things worth saying and to say them 
well; without some discrimination 
between gentle manners, in high life 
or in low, and vulgarity of peasant 
or of prince. To love Thackeray is 
almost a liberal education; yet this 
great and intensely lovable master, 
one of the greatest and most lovable 
in all fiction, lies uncalled for on the 
shelf, condemned without a hear- 
ing as a pessimist and a cynic. *' Ah, 
my worthy friend," said he, '*it is 



16 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

astonishing how soft-hearted these 
cynics are. I dare say, if we could 
have come upon Diogenes by sur- 
prise, we should have found him 
reading sentimental novels and 
whimpering in his tub." ' ' He could 
not,'* says a critic, '*have written 
* Vanity Fair ' as he has unless Eden 
had been shining in his inner eye." 
Again, no healthy-minded girl 
comes face to face with the courage- 
ous womanliness of Elizabeth Ben- 
net, rising through sweetness and 
good sense above a mother of humil- 
iating vulgarity, or the delicate con- 
science of Fanny Price, undervital- 
ized but charming in her sensitive 
devotion, without learning much 
from the author of ' ' Pride and Pre- 
judice" and of '* Mansfield Park"; 
without learning the efficiency of 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 17 

good sense and good humor in lit- 
erature and in life; without discover- 
ing that a style with no ornament, a 
style which marches straight on, is, 
in the right hands, a wonderfully 
effective style, and that a book to be 
interesting need not leave the beaten 
track of everyday life. Still again, 
no girl with a touch of the romantic, 
such as every girl should have, can 
fail to be the happier and the more 
cultivated for knowing early and al- 
ways the perennial king of English 
romance, the author of **Quentin 
Durward" and *'Ivanhoe." The 
mere mention of these three writ- 
ers — all so great, yet each so differ- 
ent from either of the others — 
is enough to make us blush for 
the hours and the days that we 
have wasted on yellow newspapers 



18 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

and yellow novels and trivial maga- 
zines. 

'*But," it maybe said, ** no matter 
how much education an untrained 
girl would get from such authors if 
she gave herself up to them, will 
she — can she — give herself up to 
them ? Can she read them with that 
zest which alone will make them 
memorable and inspiring?" With a 
little courage at the start, she can. 
Nothing about literature is more re- 
markable or more encouraging than 
the power of the greatest literature 
to reach all earnest human beings. 
Not to speak of the Bible, Shakspere 
is read in the chamber and heard on 
the stage by men and women whose 
education stopped with the gram- 
mar school ; and as to Homer we re- 
member how the snowbound out- 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 19 

casts of Poker Flat were absorbed in 
the fate of ''Ash-heels." Homer and 
Shakspere are almost in a class by 
themselves ; yet other classics, not 
so great, may educate us and, while 
educating, may delight. I know that 
to some minds the very word classic 
is cold and repellent, suggesting 
something which people tell us we 
ought to like and which, in conse- 
quence, we like the less. It is well 
to remember a helpful word of Pro- 
fessorBarrett Wendell^s, thata classic 
would not be a classic if it had not 
interested thousands of human be- 
ings, and that what has interested 
thousands of human beings cannot 
be without interest to us. Writing 
of more than transient interest — if 
written in good literary form — be- 
comes in some measure a classic. 



20 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

No classic will interest every reader ; 
but every reader, with a little experi- 
menting, can find some classic that 
interests him. Having thus discov- 
ered among books which have stood 
the test of time some one that pleases 
him, let him read others by the same 
author, whose charm he has begun 
to feel, and make that author^swork 
a part of himself. Then — so rapid 
is the growth of taste — he will find 
that trashy writing no longer meets 
his needs ; he will find, also, that a 
second interesting classic writer is 
easier to discover than a first ; in time 
he will find that some authors whom 
he rejected in his early experiments 
have become his closest friends. 
And after we have once intimately 
known great work and have felt the 
thrill of the growth that comes with 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 21 

such a knowledge, the process of 
cultivation advances fast. With it 
advances also, through the influence 
of what we read and through our un- 
conscious or half-conscious absorp- 
tion of it, our accuracy and power 
in the use of our own language. We 
have begun to hve in the most inter- 
esting society — far more interesting 
than most of that society which fre- 
quents the houses of people whose 
good fortune we envy. At small cost 
we may have on our own table the 
best work of the greatest men and 
women of all time, may think their 
thoughts, dream their dreams, see 
their visions. All that we need is a 
little staying power; for, as some 
one has said, ''every great writer 
must in some measure create the at- 
mosphere in which he is to be en- 



22 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

joyed " ; we must give him a little 
time. I have mentioned Thackeray^s 
''Newcomes." Before the opening 
chapter of ' ' The Newcomes " the 
stoutest heart may quail. Read the 
chapter or skip it, as you wish; but do 
not because of it abandon the book. 
I have said little about poetry ; yet 
poetry has, as an educator, a certain 
practical advantage which Professor 
Wendell pointed out when he ob- 
served that of all the fine arts it is 
the most portable. You can carry in 
your pocket more fine art (for less 
money) in poetry than in anything 
else. I said your pocket; I might 
have said your head. And love of 
poetry may be acquired by almost 
all. Girls as a rule are born with it 
and need only make sure that it is 
not stifled in them ; yet it is a love 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 23 

that every year may be cultivated 
and increased. Most girls, with even 
a grammar school education, care 
for Longfellow ; most girls care for 
Tennyson ; from these they may pass 
to others , widening their apprecia- 
tion every year and every day. Ten- 
nyson's *' Crossing the Bar" is no 
more helpful — and no more intel- 
ligible — than Browning's ''Pros- 
pice," the inspirationof a man whom 
most girls rej ect unread . Such works 
as Professor Norton's ''Heart of 
Oak Books," which bring together 
the best English poems for young 
people and introduce the reader to 
many authors at their best, are in- 
valuable as starting-points. Indeed 
the girl who really knows the ' ' Heart 
of Oak Books " (prose and verse) has 
no mean acquaintance with English 



24 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

literature. Such a girl, however, will 
not stop with such an acquaintance. 
She has tasted the delight of good 
reading and need no longer be bid- 
den to the feast. She has already 
begun to commit to memory the 
short poems that she loves best and 
to learn how they can transform what 
once were dull and waiting hours. 
Short poems for odd minutes — one 
to read for every day in the year — 
here is a course in culture which 
nobody is too poor to take, which 
nobody should be too dull to enjoy. 
When once a girl has gained the love 
of literature for its own sake, such 
a book as Professor Winchester's 
* * Short Courses in English Read- 
ing," which names the characteristic 
works of each important period in ^ 
our literature, will serve as an admir- 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 25 

able guide. Books, such as I have 
mentioned, that bringthereader face 
to face with the great authors them- 
selves, are vastly better than books 
about books, except as these latter 
may lead us to great authors whom 
we should otherwise neglect. 

I have barely mentioned the Bible , 
which few of us read as we should, 
none of us as v/e might, and which, 
— even apart from every religious 
consideration, -—if read little by lit- 
tle every day with an active mind, 
trains a girFs literary judgment as 
it can be trained by nothing else. 
The effect of the Bible on English 
style may be seen at its best in the 
work of John Buny an— otherwise 
almost illiterate — or of Abraham 
Lincoln, into whose heart and speech 
the Bible early found its way. To 



26 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

this book almost alone our literature 
is indebted for these self-taught 
and universally acknowledged mas- 
ters. 

I am well aware that reading is 
only one means of culture. I have 
not forgotten the culture that comes 
of intimacy with Nature; and it were 
a nice question whether Emerson 
owed more to his Plato or to his pine 
tree. I have not forgotten that 

•* There *s no one season such delight can bring 
As summer, autumn, winter, and the spring" 

or that love of books is scarcely a 
blessing at all if it seals our eyes 
— which it should aid us in keeping 
open — to the sea, the mountains, 
and the stars . I take reading for what 
it is worth as one help only, but one 
which allies others to itself even as 
the five talen ts may become ten . For 



CULTIVATE HERSELF 27 

if the germ of culture once gets into 
the system, it propagates itself with 
marvellous speed. There are, it is 
true, individuals whom it affects in 
one part and not in others, lovers 
of literature who delight in vulgar 
vaudeville, lovers of music who de- 
vour detective stories and dime nov- 
els , lovers of the pure and high who by 
contrast enjoy — or try to think they 
enjoy — sporadic attacks of the im- 
pure and low; but, in general, culture 
in one art leads to taste in others, for 
it refines the intellect. And though 
she who has cultivated herself by 
reading may know little of paint- 
ing or of music, she has put herself 
into that actively receptive condition 
which will make progress, even in 
those arts, rapid when the opportun- 
ity comes. She has learned that the 



28 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 

greatest minds, like the sun and the 
stars, shine for all who have eyes and 
hearts to welcome their quickening 
rays. She may be a teacher of stub- 
born and stupid little children ; she 
may write dull business letters at the 
dictation of vulgar men ; she may sell 
hairpins all day behind a counter ; she 
may make eyelets in a shoe factory ; 
but when the minutes come that are 
her own, she steps instantly into alife 
from which no drudgery can divorce 
her — a life the breath of which in- 
spires her daily work , however mean , 
with a kind of glory. For the work is 
her discipline, her part in the cease- 
less renewal of that great and multi- 
farious life which we call the world ; 
and she can do it, for she has tasted 
the joy of the ' * unconquerable soul." 



TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT GRADUATION 



TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT 
GRADUATION 

Graduation from school — whether 
the pupil is ' ' finished/' as we say in 
unconscious irony, or sent to college 
— is a serious matter. It sets people 
thinking about you, and sets you 
thinking about yourselves, — or, ra- 
ther, if you are right-minded, about 
your part in life. Nothing is more 
rapid and tremendous than the 
changes that will come to many of 
you in the next half-dozen years. 
How can this school or any school 
prepare you each and all for the mys- 
terious responsibilities, the suddenly 
varied and diverse complications in- 
to which time is sure to throw you? 



32 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

* * Nothing, " it was said long ago, * * is 
so certain as the unexpected." How 
can we get ready for what we know 
nothing about ? 

It is idle to speculate long on some 
things that make a fascinating dream 
and often a hard, though cherished, 
reahty ; but it is idler to drift without 
a plan, to let the certainty of the un- 
expected control your present life or 
leave it uncontrolled. Thusweseethe 
answer to my question. Life is diffi- 
cult and complex; preparation for 
life is strangely simple. Truth and 
devotion, that is all. Hold fast to 
these things, and leave the rest to 
experience. You may be green in 
many situations; you may and will 
make blunders; in the sudden turns 
of life you may not be flexible 
enough (few are); the measure of 



AT GRADUATION 33 

your success may depend on the 
measure of your intelligence: but 
you cannot utterly fail. 

You may say that telling people 
to have truth and devotion is well 
enough, but that, like the clergy- 
man's exhortation to follow Christ, 
it seems vague. Things come to our 
daily lives as concrete problems; and 
we succeed — if we do succeed — 
through repeated acts which create 
in us a habit or a general principle. 
Yet we need the principle to direct 
the acts. It is like the old question, 
* * Which came first, the hen or the 

Not quite SO bad, after all. Tomany 
women — as to some men — devo- 
tion is instinctive : to other women 
it is at first a matter of will ; but when 
they love, it becomes instinctive, as it 



34 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

does, for instance, in nearly all mo- 
thers. And every girl has some sense 
of truth. To give this sense staying- 
power, to prevent a girl from losing 
her head where her feelings are con- 
cerned, from warping her reason by 
emotion and saying anything which 
for the moment seems to help her 
cause, — to give her, in short, a 
trained ^ense of truth and a trained 
hold on it, is one object of such 
education as you have had. I know 
a school in which intellectual accu- 
racy is constantly brought to bear 
on moral life, so that even the arith- 
metic lesson helps the pupil to be 
truthful. The simple cases every 
girl understands. Every girl, for in- 
stance, in this school or in any other, 
knows that if she copies a composi- 
tion from a book or from another 



AT GRADUATION 35 

girl's work and hands it in as her 
own, she is, for the time being, false 
to her school and to herself. And 
if she thinks a minute, she cannot 
blame people for not trusting her in 
anything until she has put her life 
on such a basis as shall make dis- 
honest work impossible. Here is one 
everyday opportunity to exercise the 
principles of truth and devotion at 
school. 

You go out of school into the 
world — all of you in some degree, 
and some of you in a high degree, to 
be cultivated women — with a power 
that a few of you are just beginning 
to know. *' Who is it that rules the 
world ? " said Major Henry Lee Hig- 
ginson. '* Does n't everybody know," 
he added, ''that it is women?" The 
greater the power, the more danger- 



36 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

ous. How shall you use your power 
wisely and justly? 

Let us begin with some of the uses 
that are unwise and unjust. One of 
the lowest of these is the deliberate, 
systematic, and indiscriminate use 
of personal fascination — the use of 
power for the pleasure of exercising 
it and for no good end ; the use of 
power that unsteadies men right and 
left, and pnds in an emptiness which 
makes you scorn yourselves. Per- 
sonal charm is one of the great and 
unexplained gifts of heaven. Some 
people have it all their lives and 
never know it; and when they are 
dead, after their long and anxious 
and self-distrustful years, we wring 
our very hearts because we have not 
told them. Yet had we told them, 
and had they believed us, they might 



AT GRADUATION 87 

have lost it for ever. Indeed, I doubt 
whether we could have made them 
beheve us; at the most they would 
have feared, as Emerson's lover 
feared about the girl he loved, that 
our feeling for them had " died in 
it s las t expression . ' ' Personal charm , 
self-recognized as part of one's cap- 
ital, the power to fascinate men, 
consciously used to give zest to life, 
becomes almost despicable: at the 
very least it tends to make a girl use- 
less and leads her to make men use- 
less by distracting them; at the worst 
it breaks homes and happiness. I 
speak of something quite different 
from that desire to please which is 
born of courtesy and devotion, and 
which brings at length an honest 
charm of its own when the attrac- 
tion of the professionally charming 



38 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

has lost its power over all who 
thoroughly know them. I have in 
mind those vain and foolish girls to 
whom the homage of men is the 
glory of womanhood. The profes- 
sional beauty , though she often lacks 
personal charm, belongs in the same 
category, and what she pins her faith 
to is even more fleeting. Whatever 
you do, keep your souls white from 
the effort to fascinate men. 

Again, truth and devotion de- 
mand nowadays that a woman shall 
do something. A year or two of so- 
cial experience or of travel may be 
regarded as part of an education; but 
there is no excuse for people who 
make such things an end in life, and 
no excuse for the mere time-killer, 
whether man or woman, whether 
poor or rich. '*Mr. Jones," said a 



AT GRADUATION 39 

youth to a maiden, ''is the most 
wonderfulmanleversaw. He knows 
every card I had at bridge a week 
ago." ' 'Has it ever occurred to you," 
said the girl, "that he is forty-five 
years old and that he doesn't know 
anything else ? " " Don't you know 
that girl?" said a gentleman, as he 
bowed to a strikingly handsome lady. 
' ' She wins more money at bridge 
than any other woman in Boston." 
Even outside of the question of gam- 
bling, there is something shocking 
in that kind of notoriety, if only for 
the waste of time it implies. A game 
of cards (without gambling) for re- 
laxation now and then, by all means; 
but cards all day and half the night 
and Sunday — can you think of a life 
more arid? I remember a party of 
young men and women (Americans) 



40 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

who were visiting Rome, presuma- 
bly for the first time, and who, after 
a late breakfast, would settle in the 
hotel parlor every day for a whole 
morning at cards. What business 
had such people in Rome? What 
business had they anywhere? Men 
and women are bound to justify their 
existence. They may give years to 
preparation for the work of life (they 
are fortunate if they can), but even 
in these preparatory years — even in 
the early years of which an import- 
ant part is play — they must show, 
in their work and in their play, some 
promise of truth and devotion or the 
outlook is hard for them and theirs. 
If you are going into society for 
experience, cut out one day a week 
for deeper experience , for some kind 
of helpful work to keep your soul 



AT GRADUATION 41 

from shrinking. Whenever you see 
a society girl of pecuhar lovehness, 
you will find that society has only a 
part of her and not the best part. 
Whatever you do, whether you work 
in the slums or go to a cooking- 
school, do something outside of 
parties and calls and afternoon teas, 
which are weak diet alike for body 
and mind. Not the least advantage 
of a serious purpose is its power to 
choke affectation. No one self-for- 
getfuUy at work is affected — unless 
indeed an early affectation has * ' set , " 
or '*jelled," as it were, in her youth 
and has thus become a natural part 
of herself. 

A word here as to college. When 
I was young, a girl who went to col- 
lege was thought queer. Now a girl 
who may go and does not is some- 



42 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

times thought queerer. People who 
know have long since discovered 
that the college girl is quite as hu- 
man and delightful as any other girl, 
and likely to be a better companion 
through hfe. No doubt there are 
odd and unwomanly college girls ; 
but they are singularly few. Even 
society ** finish," for which college 
girls might seem to lack time and 
opportunity, is often acquired, in 
no small amount, at college. Those 
of us who have seen what education 
does for a woman, would send to col- 
lege every capable and healthy girl 
who has the means of going. Col- 
lege life gives us, or should give us, 
a larger way of looking at things — 
the power of seeing the difference 
between a petty thing that to the 
untrained and selfish mind seems 



AT GRADUATION 43 

big, and a little thing that is lighted 
and glorified into a big one because 
it is a small outward sign of a great 
inward truth. Take, for instance, a 
matter in which there are probably 
more sinners among women than 
among men. I do not say that col- 
lege life eradicates pettiness, but it 
ought to get out of any girFs head 
the wrong kind of sensitiveness and 
put in the right kind. By the wrong 
kind I mean what exists to a piti- 
ful extent among women otherwise 
good, the kind that busies itself with 
small questions of precedence. I have 
known women who really cared 
whether other women were asked to 
pour out tea oftener than they; I 
have known good women arranging 
a series of afternoon teas to think it 
vital that if Mrs. X. were asked to 



44 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

pour out tea, Mrs. Y. should be asked, 
and asked an equal number of times 
— even though Mrs. X. was infinitely 
better fitted than Mrs. Y. for that 
particular job. Such women, if you 
will pardon my saying it, cannot 
understand ''a good manly view" 
of people's mutual relations. It is 
right to take pains, even in small 
ways, lest others' feelings shall be 
hurt; but it is not right to decide 
everything or anything according to 
small jealousies and morbid suspi- 
cions of indignity. Among all the 
unprofitable servants (if not wicked 
and slothful) few are more unprofit- 
able than the people who are always 
on the watch for a slight. There are 
such men; there are more such wo- 
men than a healthy-minded man 
would conceive if he were not 



AT GRADUATION 45 

brought face to face with the sad 
fact. **I don't see," said a large- 
hearted woman, with college train- 
ing, who constantly busies herself 
with big and real matters, ''I don't 
see how people have time for such 
things in so good and busy a world." 
I know intimately a man who has 
been worried about nearly every- 
thing that could worry man or wo- 
man, but was never worried because 
he was not invited to Mrs. A.'s recep- 
tion, or because Mrs. B. shook hands 
with somebody else first, or because 
Mr. C. walked through a doorway 
ahead of him, or because Mr. D. sat 
at the hostess's right hand, or be- 
cause Mr. E. was asked to speak first 
or last (whichever the place of honor 
may be) — though he has often been 
worried because he himself was 



46 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

asked to speak at all. It is a shock, 
when we look up to women, and 
find them squandering their strength 
on things like these — things com- 
pared with which millinery becomes 
almost august. In Beaumont and 
Fletcher's beautiful play *'Philaster, 
or Love Lies a-bleeding,'' Euphrasia, 
a noble lady, has, like Viola, taken 
the guise of a page to serve the man 
she loves. To this page, known as 
Bellario, Philaster says, 

*• Oh, but thou dost not know what 't is to die." 
Bellario. ' ' Yes, I do, my lord. 

'T is less than to be born, a lasting sleep, 
A quiet resting from all jealousy, 
A thing we all pursue ; I know besides 
It is but giving over of a game 
That must be lost." 

When we think of the circumstances, 
the line ' ' A quiet resting from all j eal- 
ousy" becomes inexpressibly touch- 



AT GRADUATION 47 

ing. Even by itself it points to relief 
from one of the most hideous of hu- 
man passions, and one to which, I 
suspect, women, with some reason, 
are more prone than men. I think 
of the sudden hardening of face 
and voice with which one good wo- 
man speaks of another, the mean 
little insinuations of women really 
generous in big things, the petty 
spite between next-door neighbors in 
country towns, who go on for years 
without speaking to each other, 
though each would rather talk than 
do anything else in the world. You 
remember the story of the woman 
who, when the census-taker asked 
her age, replied, 

' * Did the woman next door tell 
you how old she was ? " 

**Yes.'' 



48 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

''Well, Tm two years younger 
than she is ! " 

These things may be excusable in 
villages, but not in the free, wide- 
seeing life of an educated woman. 
These are the little things that the 
great truths, of which the college 
gives us glimpses, force out of sight 
and mind. Women rule the world: 
let them keep sweet and sound. 

Akindred variety of sensitiveness, 
in which men have their full share, 
is the resentment that comes of not 
being, or seeming not to be appre- 
ciated. Some few persons, no doubt, 
are not appreciated; but they are not 
the persons who should call atten- 
tion to the fact, except by their steady 
patience and devotion. A healthy 
human being learns to pocket griev- 
ances, to burn his own smoke as the 



AT GRADUATION 49 

saying is, to waste no energy in tak- 
ing offence, to remember that since 
he does not hke everybody, he can- 
not expect everybody to hkehim. He 
learns to bear and forbear, and, best 
of all, to fix his mind not on small 
disturbances but on his work, '* with 
malice toward none, with charity for 
all/' 

The dangers at which I have hinted 
are closely related to that very sen- 
sitiveness which gives girls and wo- 
men their peculiar power. One of 
the best things in the world is the 
ability to put yourself into another's 
place — a power granted to the sen- 
sitive only, and hence to women 
rather than to men. Quickness to 
feel atmospheric cross currents in so- 
cial life, instantaneous and practical 
sympathy with grief, reckless de- 



50 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

votion beside the sick bed — these 
things belong to those who suffer in- 
deed, but suffer to noble ends. It is 
these things that show women to be 
of finer clay than men. It is these 
things, containing the very essence 
of woman's power, of which some 
women are doing their best to rid 
themselves and their sex. The rest- 
lessly agitating woman in public life 
and her near relative, the nagging 
woman in private life, may have a 
kind of truth and a kind of devo- 
tion, but not the sense of things 
in their true relation and not the 
vision of the strength of gentleness. 
Rather she to whom the old poet 
said : — 

"You for whose body God made better clay 
Or took soul's stuff such as shall late decay 
Or such as needs small change at the last day. 



AT GRADUATION 51 

**This, as an amber drop enwraps a bee, 
Covering discovers your quick soul that we 
May in your through-shine front your heart's 
thoughts see." 

A good school and a good college 
after it fill a girl's mind with the 
greater issues of life. She has '* no 
time in so good and busy a world " 
— a world that needs workers — to 
waste in coquetry or triviality or 
jealousy or vain regret that another's 
opportunity and charm are not hers. 
She sees on every hand what needs 
to be done, and like the prophet of 
old, she cries: *'Here am I, send 
me"; and behold, men look upon 
her face as it had been the face of an 
angel, for her vision is the vision of 
the pure in heart. 

Is it a low view of a woman's life 
to believe that her leadership is not 
like a man's, that nature gives men 



52. TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

one kind of power over the world 
and women another, that in pohti- 
cal competition women are as much 
at a disadvantage as men are in the 
finer sympathies and graces of hfe? 
* * I never could see," said my mother, 
'* why women should want to vote; 
but if they do want to vote, I can't 
see what right men have to say they 
shan't" — a remark that has given 
me food for reflection. I too find 
it hard to see by what right the bal- 
lot is denied to women; yet with 
direct political responsibility comes 
much that would tend to weaken 
or destroy the power by which they 
rule the world to-day. 

' *To women, "saidPresidentEliot, 
' * we owe the charm and the beauty 
of life "^and some women were of- 
fended at his saying it. It seemed like 



AT GRADUATION 53 

the old notion that women are purely 
ornamental andsecondary; itseemed 
a low view of them and their destiny. 
Yet, if I understand it, it is not only 
profoundly true, but a recognition 
of what is highest in women as what 
is highest in all human creatures — 
the power of transfiguring this daily 
drudging life of ours with the ra- 
diance that Browning had seen 
when he wrote : 

"The white I saw shine through her was her 
soul's," 

the radiance that makes the young 
mother's face a *' through-shine " 
face, the radiance that shone in and 
through Emerson when he wrote : 

'• Let me go where'er I will 
I hear a sky-born music still: 
It sounds from all things old. 
It sounds from all things young, 



^4 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

From all that's fair, from all that's foul, 
Peals out a cheerful song. 
It is not only in the rose. 
It is not only in the bird. 
Not only where the rainbow glows. 
Nor in the song of woman heard, 
But in the darkest, meanest things 
There alway, alway something sings. 
'Tis not in the high stars alone. 
Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
Nor in the red-breast's mellow tone. 
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
But in the mud and scum of things 
There alway, alway something sings." 

Emerson indeed was one of the few 
men who, still manly, felt and made 
others feel, with the intuitive refine- 
ment of a woman, '* the charm and 
the beauty of life " ; because he was 
high-minded and clean-hearted, be- 
cause he spiritualized everything, 
because his eyes were purged of the 
earthy, because he saw. There are 
women, even young girls, in whose 



AT GRADUATION 55 

presence it is impossible to dwell on 
a low thought, to live on any level 
but the highest,' — women who are a 
kind of revelation of heaven : 

*• She never found fault with you, never implied 
Your wrong by her right ; and yet men at her side 
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town 
The children were gladder thatpulled at her gown." 

There are such women that when 
their friends or their husbands or 
their children think evil or are 
tempted in business or in social life 
one hair's breadth from what is true, 
the thought of them shall make it 
harder to do wrong than to do right. 
These are the women to whom we 
owe ''the charm and the beauty of 
life." 

Not the least part of every girl's 
mission is to keep undefiled the 
spring of poetry in her heart, to live 



5Q TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

above the vulgarity that, Uke vice, 
we first endure, then pity, then em- 
brace, to remember that the poetry- 
killer is an enemy to his people. I 
know that much which passes for 
poetry is weak and immoral; but the 
poetry that I mean is what keeps us 
reverent and humble, brings us into 
instantaneous contact with the great- 
est things, rolls the mist away from 
the mountain peak : — 

" The (shepherds moved 
Through the dull mist, I following, when a step, 
A single step that freed me from the skirts 
Of the blind vapour, opened to my view 
Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
By waking sense or by the dreaming soul." 

It is ill for the nation that loses its 
poetic fervor. Yet with twelve pages 
of illustrated ** journalism" every 
week-day and a hundred and twenty 
every Sunday, with Bull Durham and 



AT GRADUATION 57 

Mr. Mennen staring at us across the 
green fields , witli what is called opera 
vulgarized by such things as we see 
depicted in street posters, and what 
is called comedy made up of the ad- 
ventures of faithless husbands and 
jealous wives, with the portraits of 
all the divorced people in real life 
and the details of their cases thrust 
under our eyes every day, it is only 
human to run down. And, as our 
population increases, it becomes 
harder and harder to free ourselves 
from the network of wires through 
which we lift our eyes to the sky- 
scrapers that shut out the eternal 
hills. Some years ago an old lady in 
Salem, Massachusetts, complained 
at the City Hall of the electric wires. 

* ' Do they hurt your house? " 

-No." 



58 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

* ' Do they damage your trees ? " 

**No." 

' ' What is the matter, then ? " 

' * Well, when Harriet and I sit out 
on the piazza, we don't want to look 
at God's heaven through a grid- 
iron." 

That is what those of us who dwell 
in cities are doing physically; and 
after doing it long physically we do 
it spiritually unless we take care. 
Some people who think they love the 
woods and the sea no sooner get to 
what they think they love than they 
vulgarize it. The sea-shore, indeed, 
where it is not private property, be- 
comes a place for clam-bakes, loop- 
ing the loop, and unconcealed love- 
making. 

Now there are two ways of holding 
fast to poetry under present condi- 
tions, and neither is quite complete 



AT GRADUATION 59 

in itself. One is by looking beyond 
the scroll-saw shanties with sign- 
boards on them, beyond the strutting 
youth with his hand thrust into the 
arm of that awful girl in yellow and 
black with pink ribbons, out on the 
everlasting sea; and this we must 
learn to do no w and then if we would , 
as it were, keep our peace with God: 
and as women are more sensitive 
than men, so do they, in the drudg- 
ery of daily hfe, stand more in need 
of a breath from the boundless ocean 
or the eternal hills : — 

**You and I and the hills 1 

Do you think we could live for a day, 
With the useless, wearying wrongs and ills 

And the cherished cares away ? 
Rebels of progress and our clay — 
Do you think we could live for a day ? 

"You and I and the dawn. 

With the great light .breaking through, 



60 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

And the woods astir with a wakened fawn, 

And our own hearts wakened, too ; 
With the bud in the hollow, the bird on the spray, 
Do you think we could live for a day ? 

"You and I and the dusk, 

With the first stars in the glow — 
And the faith that our ills are but the husk 

With the kernel of life below ; 
With the joy of the hills and the throb of the May, 
Do you think we could live for a day ? " 

The other way I have hinted "at 
already by quoting Emerson's song 
about the something that sings. It 
was tried by Walt Whitman, who 
sometimes, instead of making com- 
mon things poetic, degraded poetry. 
It has been tried, with much success 
here and there, by Mr. Kipling — in 
**Mc Andrew's Hymn," for example, 
in '* The Song of the Banjo," in the 
''King," — 

"All unseen 
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen." 



AT GRADUATION 61 

It was used long ago without try- 
ing by Homer. What is less poetic 
than dirty clothes ? Yet in the most 
tremendous part of the Iliad, when 
Achilles is hotly pursuing Hector 
round the walls of Troy, Homer in- 
troduces dirty clothes with a touch so 
sure that, even in the prose transla- 
tion, they do not lessen the poetry 
but add to it : ^ — 

' ' Past the watch-tower, past the 
wild fig-tree beaten by the wind, 
ever out from the wall, over the 
wagon path, they rushed to where 
two springs shoot upward from ed- 
dying Scamander. One with warm 
waters flows, and round about 
smoke rises from it as of flaming fire . 
The other even in summer hath a 
stream like hail or chilling snow or 
water turned to ice. And there hard 
by upon the banks are washing 
troughs, wide, of splendid stone- 
work; and there the Trojan wives 



62 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

and daughters fair would wash their 
shining robes in early days of peace 
before the sonsof the Achaians came. 
Past these they swept." 

Go back to the sources. Lose no 
opportunity of contact with greater 
nature and greater art — with woods 
and mountains and ocean, with the 
masters of music and painting and 
poetry. Begin the Iliad or the In- 
ferno, even with grammar and lexi- 
con, and you know instantly that 
you are in the presence of one of the 
greatest things in the world. To you 
the treasures of time are open; let 
them not be open in vain. Do not 
adopt a scheme or drift into a habit 
of life which will not suffer you to 
touch the hem of the garment that 
shall make you whole. What you 
get from pure religion and undefiled 



AT GRADUATION 63^ 

(not fashionable and perfunctory), 
from the mountains and the ocean, 
from the highest poetry, works in 
you and through you in ways that 
no man understands, and makes 
you see and lead others to see the 
glory that lies in and about our 
lives — a glory without the vision of 
which we '*sit in darkness, being 
bound in affliction and iron." 

In your poetry I include your 
dreams and your reveries. I remem- 
ber my dejection when a gauntr phi- 
losopher whose college lectures I 
attended, told his class of vigorous 
boys that a reverie is ' ' the worst kind 
of mental dissipation." In my heart 
I rebelled ; but I dared not then say 
that he was wrong, and he would 
have made short work of me if I had 
done so. The mere dreamer is likely 



64 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

to be of little use, I grant, though 
even he may be a poet in the chrysa- 
lis ; but deliver me from the man or 
woman who never dreams, the be- 
ing to whom, as Ruskin says, ''the 
primrose is very accurately the prim- 
rose because he does not love it." 
''Paleyis a good scholar," said an 
English schoolmaster of the famous 
editor of yEschylus, ' ' but he will use 
such a word as ' irreclaimably ' in 
translating a Greek tragic chorus." 
Can such a man really know anything 
of Greek poetry ? Poetry is so evasive 
and volatile that often, if we turn a 
poem word for word into another 
language, the poetry has gone ; the 
spirit has refused to change its house . 
Much of our poetry comes to us in 
these very reveries; ''for dreams 
also," said Plato, "are from God." 



AT GRADUATION 65 

This is another way of saying, do 
not be afraid of being romantic. So 
long as you have principles to keep 
you from seeing romance in bad 
things — such as the life of fast men 
— and humor to keep you from 
sentimental folly, be romantic if you 
will, and be the better for it. Next 
to strong faith there is nothing that 
will help you through the tight 
places like romance and humor. En- 
thusiasm is your right and your 
glory by reason of your youth. Cher- 
ish it, and if it leads you to a foolish 
blunder now and then, save yourself 
by humor : — 

*'0n fire that glows 
With heat intense 
I turn the hose 
Of common sense. 
And out it goes 
At small expense. 



66 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

It is romance that discovers new 
worlds and new stars — science, if 
you will, but romance in science. It 
is romance in one life that kindles 
another life to brave deeds and de- 
voted service. Your romance, there- 
fore, is part of your high efficiency. 
People try sometimes to strip science 
and literature and history of ro- 
mance ; but their science repels, their 
literature irritates and stupefies : as 
for their history, in the words of Mr. 
Justice Holmes, *' After history has 
done its best to fix men's thoughts 
upon strategy and finance, their 
eyes have turned and rested on some 
single romantic figure, — some Sid- 
ney, some Montcalm, some Shaw." 
Buildyour air-castles, and when you 
find yourself ceasing to build them, 
throw yourself into some great work 



AT GRADUATION 67 

that shall rouse you to build more. 
Into them goes, and out of them 
comes again threefold the buoyancy 
of your life. * ' I know, " says Emer- 
son, ' 'how easy it is to sneer at your 
sanguine youth and its glittering 
dreams. But I find the gayest castles 
in the air that were ever piled far 
better for comfort and for use than 
the dungeons in the air that are daily 
dug and carved out by grumbling, 
discontented people." 

It seems strange to tell young girls 
with every appearance of health and 
happiness that one of the hardest 
problems of life is to keep cheerful ; 
but I dare say some of you know it 
already. I remember an old New 
Englander who unconsciously re- 
vealed his theory of life in his salu- 
tation, which was not * * How do you 



/ 



68 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

do?" but **How do you stan' it?" 
No matter how free our animal 
spirits, how spontaneous our fun, 
how dehghtful our friends, we are 
compassed about by all sorts of sin 
and sorrow (as any newspaper will 
show us in one minute) as well as 
by the awful mystery of life and 
death. Sometimes our despondency 
has a prosaic cause, such as hunger, 
which, though it shows how the 
mind may be a slave to the body, is 
not lasting. Oftener depression is 
the reaction from what few, young 
or old, can resist in so busy and 
complicated a world, — the effort to 
carry a great deal more than our 
bodies and minds can stand up un- 
der. It is depression of the nervous 
system, which system we have dis- 
regarded in our plans. Do not forget 



AT GRADUATION 69 

that the better and the harder you 
have worked, the stronger is the re- 
action, the deeper the depression, 
the more nearly ineradicable the 
notion that you have failed. Keep, 
if you can, a steady hand on yourself, 
and do not be misled into a life that 
will take all the rebound out of your 
system while you are still in your 
girlhood; since nothing, not even 
training, can quite make up for the 
elastic strength of youth when mind 
and body rejoice in their own activ- 
ity, and when work at conscious 
high pressure, or at conscious low 
pressure, is unknown. 

Yet out of that same nervous sen- 
sitiveness' which uncontrolled brings 
its days of depression may come an 
exquisite joy. When my old teacher, 
Doctor William Everett, declared 



70 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

that Sparta had no great men, I ven- 
tured to name Leonidas. **Leoni- 
dasl" he exclaimed. '* Nothing but 
bull-dog about him.'' Whether he 
was right or wrong as to Leonidas, I 
do not know ; but he had in mind the 
general truth that a man may be 
brave in proportion to his sensitive- 
ness. It follows that a woman, be- 
yond all, may know the triumphant 
ecstasy of courage. 

My friend Professor Barrett Wen- 
dell, after making a speech at a girls' 
college, came back low in his mind. 
'at was bad," he said. *^Why?" I 
asked. '^Wasn't ittrue?" **Yes,"he 
answered, ' nhat was the trouble with 
it." So it must always seem to the 
preacher of old doctrines . Yet old as 
are the doctrines and the experiences 
of which I speak, to you of the grad- 



AT GRADUATION 71 

uating class the experiences must in 
part be new. There are few groups 
of human beings more interesting 
than a class of schoolgirls going out 
into the new world of college or of 
society. There are few hearts of men 
or women that do not yearn toward 
them, longing to help them with that 
experience which they would prob- 
ably reject and to which, after all, 
there is no royal road. No one can 
speak to you and forget that you are 
to rule the next generation; that to 
you yourlovers, your husbands, your 
children will look for the best part of 
what makes life beautiful and true. 
You stand together for the last time. 
Is there no word that is yours and 
yours only — nothing but the old 
exhortation to the old virtues? No, 
there is nothing but this : Speak the 



72 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 

truth, do your work, and see the 
glory of it all. Donotjointhebandof 
those who chafe without what they 
call *' large opportunities," but do 
your work in such a spirit as shall 
make larger the opportunities you 
have. ' 'You picture to yourself," says 
Phillips Brooks, ' 'the beauty of brav- 
ery and steadfastness. And then 
some wretched little disagreeable 
duty comes which is your martyr- 
dom, the lamp for your oil; and if 
you do not do it, your oil is spilled." 
Remember that 

••Hye god som tyme senden can 
His grace in-to a litel oxes stalle." 

Do your work with that love which is 
the quintessenceof yourwomanhood 
— not just your work and no more, 
but a little more for the lavishing's 
sake, that little more which is worth 



AT GRADUATION 73 

all the rest, for it '^discovers your 
quick soul." Shake off the petty 
meannesses that beset a sensitive 
heart: work greatly, love greatly. 

And if you suffer as you must, and 
if you doubt as you may, do your 
work. Put your heart into it, and 
the sky will clear. Then out of your 
very doubt and suffering shall be 
born the supreme joy of life : and 
whether you know it or not, there 
will be those who when everything 
seems to close black about them 
will yet say to themselves, 

"God's in his heaven, 
All's right with theiworld,'* 

for I have seen Him in her face. 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

A It is more than forty years since 
the girls' college appeared in Amer- 
ica. Contrary to prophecy, some 
women who went to it remained 
women still ; hence the girls' college 
girl of the second generation, — who 
is now well under way. We have 
thus begun to test the staying power 
of the educated woman — in body, 
in mind, and in womanliness. 

Some fifty years ago Dr. Holmes, 
after dwelling on the vulgarities of 
girls' ' ' finishing^' schools, remarked, 
** And yet these schools, with their 
provincial French and their mechan- 
ical accomplishments, with their 
cheap parade of diplomas and Com- 
mencements, and other public hon- 



78 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

ors, have an ever fresh interest to 
all who see the task they are per- 
forming in our new social order. 
These girls are not being educated 
for governesses, or to be exported 
with other manufactured articles. 
. . . Most of them will be wives, and 
every American husband is a pos- 
sible President of the United States. 
Anyone of these girls maybe a four 
years' queen. There is no sphere of 
human activity so exalted that she 
may not be called upon to fill it." 
.y ' * But," he adds, * * there is another 
consideration of far higher interest. 
The education of our community to 
all that is beautiful is flowing in 
mainly through its women, and that 
to a considerable extent by the aid of 
these large establishments, the least 
perfect of which do something to 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 79 

stimulate the higher tastes and par- 
tially instruct them. Sometimes 
there is perhaps reason to fear that 
girls will be too highly educated for 
their own happiness, if they are lifted 
by their culture out of the range of 
the practical and everyday working 
youth by whom they are surrounded. 
But this is a risk we must take. Our 
young men come into active life so 
early that, if our girls were not edu- 
cated to something beyond mere 
practical duties, our material pro- 
sperity would outstrip our culture, as 
it often does in places where money 
is made too rapidly. This is the mean- 
ing, therefore, of that somewhat am- 
bitious programme common to most 
of these large institutions, at which 
we sometimes smile, perhaps curi- 
ously or uncharitably." 



80 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

What I have cited gives, I suspect, 
a pretty fair notion of the ordinary 
academic training for girls in the 

y middle of the nineteenth century — 
a sort of bluff at literary and artistic 
culture, together with something 
popularly believed to be French. 
Even such an education gave access 
to great works of literature ; and this 
to a girl of natural refinement was 

V much. A vulgar girl gets her Shak- 
spere and Milton from her teacher ; 
and if he is not an interpreter but 
a mere middleman, she is about as 
well off before reading them as after. 
A girl of finer and higher power may 
be led to Shakspere and Milton by 
the veriest charlatan; but once led 
to them, she makes them her own. 
Out of those crude academies came 
women of a sensitive, though nar- 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 81 

row, culture that the academies 
themselves could not understand — 
such women as to-day go to college 
if they can and, at any sacrifice, send 
their daughters. 

^ Dr. Holmes, we remember, feared 
that even the old academy might 
make 'a girl intellectually too exact- 
ing for the young men of her own 
circle who came early into active 
life ; and to-day the girls' college is 
charged with the same offence. That 
has not been the danger to girls in 
the relative education of the sexes. 
A boy and girl have grown up to- 
gether, have, in the country phrase, 
**gone together" for years, have 
learned to love each other, and have 
told each other what they have 
learned. The boy, quick at study 
and ambitious, has been sent to 



8^ TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

college ; the girl has stayed at home 
and waited for him. The boy has 
outgrown the girl. It is partly his 
selfishness, but chiefly the inevitable 
need, with his newly opened mind, 
of a companion with intellectual 
interests and intellectual training. 
^^ More and more he feels her rusticity 
and makes her feel it. Then comes 
the tragedy of the higher education, 
but it is not the tragedy of the higher 
education of women. In these days 
when more and more of our country 
boys go to college, there would be 
more such tragedies if our girls' col- 
leges throughout the land were not 
fitting girls for a life — married or 
single — with resources of which half 
a century ago girls never dreamed. 
Now, when the boy goes to college, 
the girl goes too. Now, instead of 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 83 

defending such culture as strays into 
pretentious school programmes, we 
find ourselves wedging our curricu- 
lum with '^domestic science," lest 
the ideal crowd out the practical 
and the girl forget she is a girl. 
- College life, in its effect on a girl's 
mind, has not justified the sceptic's 
fears. College girls break down, it is 
true; yet no sensible girl, with good 
secondary training, breaks down 
from over-study. There are fanatics 
in study, whom neither advice nor 
command can restrain; who, like 
Milton, could not listen to the phy- 
sician, not though he were yEscula- 
pius himself; who, like Milton, are 
ready to grow deliberately blind for 
what they conceive to be a good 
cause. '' One must have dyspepsia," 
said a woman with a wild passion 



84 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

for learning — "" One must have dys- 
pepsia, or be a clod." There are girls 
(and boys) who break down because 
they persist in doing intellectual 

^^ work underfed. ' 'We must all learn 
self-control/' says Major Henry Lee 
Higginson. ''One man loves rum; 
another, work." Thereare more girls 
who break down because they lack 
the sense to see that they cannot at 
the same time lead a life actively in- 
tellectual and a life actively social. 
Overwork at college is quite differ- 
ent from overwork in college studies, 
with which it is often confounded. 

^ Commonly it is caused by theatricals, 
dances, music, athletics, making 
(and eating) fudge, — in short by 
all the manifold secondary things 
which, with human perversity, we 
insist on treating as primary. These 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 85 

things are in themselves good — ex- 
cept perhaps the fudge, which I have 
added to my hst at the suggestion of a 
true and certainly a tried college offi- 
cer; but they are not good unless they 
know their place and stay there. 
Why so many of us put second things 
first and first things second or third 
I leave for psychologists to explain. 
A boy does it with less danger to his 
health, because a boy, as a rule, can 
shed, or benumb, or hypnotize his 
^conscience ; but woe to the girl — 
woe sooner or later — whose con- 
science is strong enough to make 
her study, yet not strong enough to 
keep her from what unfits her for 
study. When all is said, I believe that 
there is more nervous prostration in 
'^society " than in college, and that 
the disease is especially virulent 



86 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

among those women whose chief 
business is to kill time . In ' * society " 
there is also, from the college girFs 
point of view, a pathetic want of 
intellectual life. 
i^ The effect of college training on a 
girl's mind is promptly visible and 
nearly always delightful. Now and 
then you see a girl — or a girls' 
college — whose culture is mixed 
with an affectation both amusing 
and sad ; but in affectation the soci- 
ety girl is sunk far deeper and with 
less hope of emerging. Nor does the 
college woman put on airs more in- 
sufferably than the college man, the 
youth with what Thackeray calls 
* ' that indescribable genteel simper 
which is only to be learned at the 
knees of Alma Mater." Affectation 
is something to which, in either sex 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 87 

and in every sphere, light weights 
take kindly. College professors, 
social leaders, salesmen, milliners, 
brakemen in railway trains — all of 
us unless we watch ourselves ; still 
more if we watch ourselves — may 
be its victims. The college student 
catches at least glimpses of the 
big things which awe us into sim- 
plicity. And not simplicity only, but 
reverence. ''They talk of science 
and religion," said a distinguished 
professor in the Harvard Medical 

u School. ''No man can begin to 
see scientific truth without finding 
something which, if he is a man of 
any size, will keep him reverent." 

I doubt whether any one has told 
more effectively what a college may 

-^^do for a girl's mind than Dr. Thomas 
Fuller. In his " Church History of 



88 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

Britain," he gives a short chapter to 
' ' The Con veniency of She-Colleges . ' ' 
(I once quoted this chapter at Smith 
College, and was accused of mak- 
ing it up.) *' Nunneries also," he 
observes, ''were good She-Schools, 
wherein the girls and maids of the 
neighborhood were taught to read 
and work; and sometimes a little 
Latin was taught them therein. Yea, 
give me leave to say, if such feminine 
foundations had still continued, pro- 
vided no vow were obtruded upon 
them . . . haply the weaker sex (be- 
side the avoiding modern inconven- 
iences) might be heightened to a 
higher perfection than hitherto hath 
been attained. That sharpness of 
their wits, and suddenness of their 
conceits, which their enemies must 
allowunto them, mightby education 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 89 

be improved into a judicious solidity ; 
and that adorned with arts which 
now they want, not because they can- 
not learn, but are not taught them. 
I say, if such feminine foundations 
were extant nowadays, haply some 
virgins of highest birth would be 
glad of such places ; and, I am sure, 
their fathers and elder brothers 
would not be sorry for the same." 
cJIhe feminine mind, with its quick 
intuitions and unsteady logic, may 
keep the intuitions and gain a firm- 
ness which makes it more than tran- 
siently stimulating. The emotional 
mind has its charm, especially if its 
emotions are favorable to ourselves. 
Women have long been celebrated 
for their power to love blindly — the 
kind of love some men must have if 
they are to have any. They are cele- 



90 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

brated also for their power to keep 
on loving the unworthy when their 
eyes are opened. ''Her lot is on 
you," says Mrs. Hemans in ''Even- 
ing Prayer at a Girls' School'' : — 

*• Her lot is on you — silent tears to weep, 
And patient smiles to wear through suffering's 
hour, 

And sumless riches, from affection's deep 
To pour on broken reeds — a wasted shower 1 

And to make idols, and to find them clay, 
And to bewail that worship. Therefore pray 1 

*♦ Her lot is on you — to be found untired. 
Watching the stars out by the bed of pain, 

With a pale cheek, and yet a brow inspired, 
And a true heart of hope, though hope be vain ; 

Meekly to bear with wrong, to cheer decay. 
And, oh I to love through all things. Therefore 
pray 1 " 

/ In some things it may be well that 
emotion is greater than logic ; but 
emotion in logic is sad to contend 
with, sad even to contemplate — and 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 91 

such is too often the reasoning of the 
untrained woman. Do not for a mo- 
ment suppose that I beheve such 
reasoning pecuHar to women; but 
from the best men it has been in 
great measure trained out ; and it 
affects a higher grade of women, 
partly from physical causes, chiefly 
from a lack through many genera- 
tions of the remedy applied to the 
best men. It is scarcely seventy-five 
years since a young New England 
girl, a lawyer's daughter, spent many 
hours in working on a sampler these 
verses, presumably absorbing them 
into her system as she worked : — 

*' Plain as this canvas was, as plain we find 
Unlettered, unadorned, the female mind. 
No fine ideas fill the vacant soul, 
No graceful coloring animates the whole. 
By close attention carefully inwrought 
Fair education paints the pleasing thought, 



92 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

My heart exults while to the attentive eye 
The curious needle spreads the enamelled dye. 
While varying shades the pleasing task beguile, 
My friends approve me and my parents smile." 

It seems just to believe that a girl 
may have more mind than the poet 
approved, without less charm. Dry- 
den has been laughed at for saying 
that a man needs ' * in some measure 
a mathematical head to be a com- 
plete and excellent poet," and that 
imagination in poetry needs the 
* ' clogs " of judgment ; yet in some 
6^ degree Dry den was right. To be re- 
spected, poetry — and women, who 
are at their best a kind of poetry 
— must make sense. There is sense 
in loving the broken idol. To love 
what is proved unworthy is not the 
weakness of woman ; it is rather the 
strength of God. 

In a right-minded, sound-hearted 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 93 

girl, college training tends toward 
control of the nervous system ; and 
control of the nervous system — 
making it servant and not master — 
is almost the supreme need of wo- 
men. Without such control they be- 
come helpless; with it they know 
scarcely a limit to their efficiency. 
The world does not yet understand 
that for the finest and highest work 
it looks and must look to the natu- 
rally sensitive, whether women or 
men. I remember expressing to the 
late Professor Greenough regret that 
a certain young teacher was nervous. 
His answer has been a comfort to me 
ever since. *'I wouldn't give ten 
cents for any one who isn't." The 
nervous man or woman is bound 
to suffer ; but the nervous man or 
woman may rise to heights that the 



94 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

naturally calm can never reach and 
can seldom see. To whom do you go 
for counsel? To the calm, no doubt ; 
but never to the phlegmatic — 
never to the calm who are calm be- 
cause they know no better (like the 
man in Ruskin ' ' to whom the prim- 
rose is very accurately the primrose 
because he does not love it"). You 
go to the calm who have fought 
for their calmness, who have known 
what it is to quiver in every nerve, 
but have put through whatever they 
have taken in hand. ' ' I saw a queer 
old man over there in the corner," 
said a little girl sent to bed in the 
dark ; * ' but I just turned my back to 
him and shut my eyes tight." That 
child, if she had lived, would be a 
counsellor of men and women. When 
the suffering of nervous people ex- 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 95 

presses itself in constant exposition 
of their symptoms, when their own 
nerves become the centre of their 
Hves, we are sometimes so hasty as to 
wish either that they had no nerves, 
or that we had none. We forget that 
they show ^^erverted power. What 
suffering is that of the countless men 
and women who have fortitude with- 
out strength — like horses that road 
so many miles an hour ' ' on their 
courage ! " Yet I question whether 
their lives are not as efficient as those 
^hat know no weariness. For nobody 
who is not '' strung high" can take 
many points of view beside his own, 
a power essential to that spiritual 
largeness to which we look for help. 
If you can sympathize, you mus*^^ 
suffer. Would you give up sympa- 
thizing to be rid of suffering? We 



96 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

admire a machine, but we do not 
go to it for advice. Should you Hke 
to be free from the annoyance of 
those who seek you as a counsel- 
lor? They take your time, wear 
your nerves, harrow your feelings, 
often reject what you offer, leave 
you exhausted and depressed with 
the depression of seeming ineffi- 
ciency, with a sense of total failure. 
Yet it cannot be total failure, for 
I they come again. And if you stop 
to think, you will thank heaven that 
there is something in you (God 
knows what) which makes you a 
woman from whom the perplexed 
cannot keep away. Some of the per- 
plexed are bores. No matter. If you 
give your life's blood to those who 
ask for it, you must expect some 
of them to receive it as Mr. Casau- 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 97 

bon received Dorothea's love, with 
** sandy absorption." You must ex- 
pect even a vampire now and then. 
I knew a teacher who received mer- 
ciless visits from the father of one of 
his pupils — a father who contended 
at great and, if I may say it, circular 
length that his son, an exception- 
ally dull youth, ought to have high 
marks and scholarships whatever his 
instructors thought ; that his son 
knew more history than the profes- 
sors and was a marvel of learning to 
all who understood him. The teacher 
writhed inwardly, but sat through 
the last visit as he had sat through 
the others. ' ' My time is worse than 
wasted," he said to himself. ''The 
man is as hopeless as his son." Sud- 
denly at the end of an hour or so, the 
father, to whom not one point had 



98 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

been yielded, rose to go . * ' One thing 
I'll say to you," he said. ''YouVe 
got the patience of an ox I " and the 
teacher felt that he was paid ; paid 
because what he had tried to do and 
had come perilously near failing to 
do he had done — because if he could 
stand that man indefinitely, and 
could make the man see that he 
could stand him, he could stand any- 
body for ever after. ''This listen- 
ing to truth and error," says Mr. 
Chesterton, '' to heretics, to fools, to 
intellectual bullies, to desperate par- 
tisans, to mere chatterers, to sys- 
tematic poisoners of the mind, is 
the hardest lesson that humanity 
has ever been set to learn." 

All this may seem to have little 
connection with colleges. There are 
numberless sweet and patient wo- 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 99 

men who never studied beyond the 
curriculum of the district school, 
women who help every one near 
them by their own unselfish loveli- 

^---ness; but the intelligently patient, 
the women who can put themselves 
into the places of all sorts of people, 
who can sympathize not merely with 
great and manifest griefs, but with 
every delicate jarring of the human 
soul — hardest of all, with the am- 
bitions of the dull — these women, 
who must command a respect intel- 
lectual as well as moral, reach their 
highest efficiency through experi- 
ence based on college training. 

I dwell on these things because 
the older I grow the more clearly I 

.— see that one of the great problems of 
life is the transmuting of sensitive- 
ness into strength, of weakness into 



100 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

inspiration. '*To be weak/' says 
Satan in ''Paradise Lost," ''is mis- 
erable, doing or suffering. " ' ' I take 
pleasure," says St. Paul, " in infirm- 
ities, in reproaches, in necessities, 
in persecutions, in distresses for 
Christ^s sake ; for when I am weak, 
then am I strong." The problem 
confronts many men and most wo- 
men. The author of the Upton Let- 
ters, himself as delicately sensitive 
as a woman, writes thus of depres- 
sion : ' ' When one lies awake in 
the morning, before the nerves are 
braced by contact with the whole- 
some day; when one has done a 
tiring piece of work, and is alone, 
and in that frame of mind when one 
needs occupation, but yet is not 
brisk enough to turn to the work 
one loves ; in those dreary intervals 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 101 

between one's work, when one is off 
with the old and not yet on with the 
new — well I know all the corners 
of the road, the shadowy cavernous 
places where the demons lie in wait 
for one, as they do for the wayfarer 
(do you remember ?) in Bewick, who, 
desiring to rest by the roadside, 
finds the dingle all alive with am- 
bushed fiends, horned and heavy- 
limbed, swollen with the oppressive 
clumsiness of nightmare." *'But 
you," he adds to his correspondent, 
*'have enough philosophy to wait 
until the frozen mood thaws, and 
the old thrill comes back. That is 
one of the real compensations of 
u^ middle age. When one is young, 
one imagines that any depression 
will be continuous ; and one sees the 
dreary uncomforted road winding 



102 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

ahead over bare hills till it falls to 
the dark valley." 

All this is true: depression goes 
as mysteriously as it came, the fog 
lifts as suddenly as it closed in ; but 
this at best is consolation, not gos- 
pel — a sort of half-hearted assur- 
ance that life is not so bad after all. 
What I mean by the transmuting 
of weakness, of sensitiveness, into 
strength is more active than resigna- 
tion, more courageous than forti- 
tude . In Browning's ' 'Childe Roland 
to the Dark Tower came," the hero 
passes through everything that 
could take the heart out of a man — 
the most desolate, the meanest, the 
most God-forsaken country that ever 
poet depicted or imagined, in which 
every object seems knavishly de- 
signed to terrify by a sort of foul 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 103 

ignobleness, such as summons all 
manner of evil spirits into a fear- 
ful mind and yields nothing for a 
healthy mind to react on. Through 
what seems the deliberate effort of 
Nature to sap his power of resisting 
fear, he goes on and on till suddenly 
he is face to face with death. Then 
comes the story which — next to 
that of the cross — shows best the 
quivering human soul that feels to 
the full every terror real or imagin- 
ary, yet steels itself to its work till 
its last act is an act of triumph and 
an inspiration to the world : — 

" Burningly it came on me all at once, 

This was the place 1 those two hills on the right. 
Grouched like two bulls locked horn in horn 
in fight, 
While, to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . • 

Dunce, 
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, 
After a life spent training for the sight I 



104 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

V What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? 
The round, squat turret, blind as the fool's 

heart, 
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart 
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf 
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf 
He strikes on only when the timbers start. 

"Not see? because of night perhaps?— why, day 
Came back again for that 1 before it left, 
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: 
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, 

^ Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, — 
'Now stab and end the creature — to the heft I* 

*• Not hear, when noise was everywhere I it tolled 
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears 
Of all the lost adventurers my peers, — 
How such a one was strong, and such was bold, 
And such was fortunate, yet each of old 
Lost, lost I one moment knelled the woe of 
years. 

*' There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met 
To view the last of me, a living frame 
For one more picture I in a sheet of flame 
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet 
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, 
And blew. ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower 
earner" 



V 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 105 

This is the courage that is possible 
to every woman and indeed, in a 
world like ours, necessary to women 
if they are to realize the high pur- 
pose of their lives. With this cour- 
age they may accomplish almost 
anything. ''Do not be disheart- 
ened/' said Father Taylor, ''because 
you are so weak. Remember that 
eighteen hundred years ago twelve 
feeble pair of arms lifted up the 
world and carried it to God." 

I speak of that high womanliness 
which is as unlike femininity as pu- 
erility or juvenility is unlike strong 
and wholesome youth, that woman- 
liness which it is the purpose of a 
woman's college to inspire and to 
sustain. The notion that a woman 
is at her best a sort of pretty fool with 
smelling salts is one of the first false 



106 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

notions that the girls' college has 
dispelled. The college woman, as I 
see her, is a woman through and 
through — not an alluring time-killer 
who appeals at her worst to the basest 
and at her best to the most frivolous 
instincts of man. * ' I believe in col- 
lege girls as wives," said a Harvard 
graduate with no daughters but with 
two sons who had married college 
girls. One of these wives was abroad 
with her husband, who was study- 
ing ; the other was keeping house 
for her husband and little child, with 
no servant, — and a happier house- 
hold I have seldom seen. College life 
had been her business once ; domes- 
tic life was her business now : and 
her training had taught her to take 
up whatever was her business with a 
whole heart. The college life of the 



;to college girls 107 

past enlarged and brightened the do- 
mestic hfe of the present. Her sweet- 
ness was intellectual as well as moral. 
^'Her college life had made her a bet- 
ter companion to her husband, a 
better guide and guardian to her 
child. 

Those who fear that the higher 
education unfits women for drudgery 
have in mind either the wrong kind 
of higher education or the wrong 
kind of women. An ofiBcer of a wo- 
man's college, when asked whether 
she would let her students hear an 
enthusiastic physician who urged 
college girls to think of becoming 
nurses, remarked that she did not 
care for nursing as a profession 
among educated women because of 
its many ** disagreeable details." She 
failed to see that a great nurse — like 



108 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

a great anybody else — is to some 
degree inspired, and that to an in- 
spired being a disagreeable detail, if 
a detail of duty, is glorified as a small 
part of that duty which is a crown- 
^ ing joy. If college training is good 
for anything, it is good in showing 
us what little things are little, and 
what, as necessary parts of the great, 
have themselves taken on a kind of 
greatness. Without a glimpse of the 
great to which the little is essential, 
of the little which we love because, 
like Browning's star, ithas ** opened 
its soul " to us, life becomes at its best 
endurable, and earth, as the hymn 
says, *'a desert drear." With such a 
glimpse, the faintest-hearted of us 
may have— indeed must have — 
moments of triumph. At college we 
are taught to feel the unexplored big- 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 109 

ness of every subject, the relation of 
truth to truth. A Harvard student 
once complained bitterly that Zo- 
ology a? and Economics^ (Sociology) 
conflicted in their lecture hours. To 
my untrained mind no conflict could 
be less damaging; he, however, ex- 
plained that * ' Since Sociology has 
left the Sunday School and become a 
Science, no man can study it with- 
out a knowledge of the lower forms 
of animal life," — and I dare say he 
was right. As to small details, I have 
seen enthusiasm for a comma which 
seemed to me not the petty love of 
a little thing, but part of a large zeal 
for truth. 

\J Let us consider what connection, 
if any, college life has with the un- 
womanliness so often charged to 
its account. If our grandmothers 



no TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

wrought such samplers as I have de- 
scribed, is it any wonder that their 
descendants, emancipated, felt like 
colts turned loose in a field? Or that 
**the female mind," so carefully 
emptied before, did not always 
evince a trained wisdom in electing 
what to be filled with? Just as in the 
girls' boarding school the proscrip- 
tion of boys made boys more inter- 
esting, so the prescription of femin- 
inity gave masculinity a charm. This 
was especially true of sporting mas- 
culinity, which in men themselves is 
often half affectation. Few things 
are more pitiable than a woman's 
deliberate imitation of a sporting 
man ; but the masculine woman is 
not the college woman. Offensive 
masculinity in a woman argues 
weakness such as colleges strive to 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 111 

remove. The effeminate man and 
the mascuhne woman are ahke 
weak in that discernment which 
tells people what they are made for, 
what they cannot be becomingly, 
and what they cannot be at all. A 
Harvard student commenting on a 
celebrated but overrated preacher 
observed, ** Briefly, his whole pulpit 
manner is that of a man not quite big 
enough to be simple." In the effem- 
inate man and in the masculine wo- 
man we feel a w^ant of size — much 
as we feel a want of size in the Amer- 
ican traveller whom a few weeks 
in England have covered with what 
Professor Greenough used to call 
* * Britannia plate." It is the littleness 
of a person not strong enough to re- 
sist the moulding force of surround- 
ings. There are, it is true, occupa- 



112 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

tions in which scarcely anybody can 
succeed without loss of that mod- 
est gentleness which becomes both 
women and nien. An auctioneer, a 
book agent, an '* interviewing" re- 
porter must dull his sensibilities and 
sharpen his wits. It is not so with a 
college student ; certainly it is not 
so with a college graduate as such. 
The good and the great may pass 
through impressionable periods 
which render them more or less 
absurd to others, and in retrospect 
to themselves. That is another mat- 
ter. ** Pen's condescension," says 
Thackeray, **at this time of his life 
was a fine thing to witness. Amongst 
men of ability this assumption and 
impertinence passes off with ex- 
treme youth ; but it is curious to 
watch the conceit of a generous and 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 113 

clever lad — there is something al- 
most touching in every early ex- 
hibition of simplicity and folly." 
Just so a slight athletic swagger in a 

^ young woman with a basketball halo 
does not mean that she will be man- 
nish for life. It subsides, like the 
puffed cheeks of mumps — rather 
grotesque while it lasts, but not at 
all prophetic. College life, designed 
as it is to strengthen a girFs intellect 

i and character, should teach her to 
understand better, and not worse, 
herself as distinguished from other 
beings of her own sex or the oppo- 
site, should fortify her individuality, 
her power of resisting, and her de- 
termination to resist, the contagion 
of the unwomanly. Exaggerated 
study may lessen womanly charm ; 
but there is nothing loud or mascu- 



114 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 

line about it. Nor should we judge 
mental training or anything else by- 
scattered cases of its abuse. The 
only characteristics of women that 
the sensible college girl has lost are 
feminine frivolity, and that kind of 
headless inaccuracy in thought and 
speech which once withheld from 
the sex — or from a large part of it 
— the intellectual respect of edu- 
cated men. 

V At college, if you have lived right- 
ly, you have found enough learning 
to make you humble, enough friend- 
ship to make your hearts large and 
warm, enough culture to teach you 
the refinement of simplicity, enough 
wisdom to keep you sweet in poverty 
and temperate in wealth. Here you 
have learned to see great and small 
in their true relation, to look at both 



TO COLLEGE GIRLS 115 

sides of a question, to respect the 
point of view of every honest man 
or woman, and to recognize the 
point of view that differs most 
widely from your own. Here you 
have found the democracy that ex- 
cludes neither poor nor rich, and 
the quick sympathy that listens to 
all and helps by the very listening. 
Here too, it may be at the end of a 
long struggle, you have seen — if 
only in transient glimpses — that 
after doubt comes reverence, after 
anxiety peace, after faintness cour- 
age, and that out of weakness we are 
made strong. Suffer these glimpses 
to become an abiding vision, and 
you have the supreme joy of life. 



COLLEGE TEACHERS 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT BRYN 
MAWR COLLEGE, 1911 



COLLEGE TEACHERS 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT BRYN 
MAWR COLLEGE, 1911 

First, let me relieve your minds of 
one apprehension. I am not going 
to talk about ''woman/' not even 
about the education of woman as wo- 
man ; nor about the relative talents 
and powers and privileges of the 
sexes. My subject, however, is no 
fresher than if I were. Woman I 
may steer clear of; education I can- 
not. The question what a college 
education can do for us will never 
be answered until we know what is 
a college, what is education, and 
what are we, — inquiries which 



120 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

countless persons answer with con- 
fidence and ease, but which no two 
persons answer alike. I cannot pro- 
fess to solve these or any other pro- 
blems of the centuries. I can merely 
look at certain aspects of college ed- 
ucation in America. 

Some years ago a committee of the 
Harvard Faculty was appointed to 
consider how the teaching in Har- 
vard College might be improved. It 
began with the simple proposition 
that there are two parties to teaching, 
the teacher and the taught; and it 
continued with the corollary nearly 
as simple, — no investigation of 
teaching is worth much which does 
not take into account the effect on the 
taught. Accordingly it sent out two 
sets of questions, one to the teachers, 
one to the students, selecting enough 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT Ul 

good, bad, and mediocre students 
from each class to represent pub- 
lic opinion fairly. Every reply had 
a signature as a guarantee of good 
faith, but the signatures were 
promptly detached. They were kept 
by the chairman of the committee, 
and have never been read, even by 
him. The seventeen hundred an- 
swers from students, answers nearly 
always friendly, often enthusiastic, 
and at times wonderfully shrewd, 
are probably the truest comment 
ever made on instruction in Harvard 
College. President, then Professor 
Lowell, was a member of the com- 
mittee. Always alert and ready for 
new light, not improbably the best 
teacher in the college, he had no 
sooner read the students' comments 
on his course than he improved his 



122 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

method. Some other mien received 
such comments with contempt and 
the committee's report with wrath; 
not the only half-honest wrath of 
self-defenders (for the students' 
comments were not vicious), but the 
wrath of men who maintained that 
the whole matter was none of the 
committee's business, and that the 
committee should have known as 
much . Did not these very men as un- 
dergraduates express clear and vig- 
orous opinions about their teachers, 
and have they changed many of those 
opinions since? At fifty-five I know, 
if I know anything, that though I 
have had many good teachers , I have 
had five born teachers, and five only, 
— one in the grammar school, two 
in the high school, and two in the 
college. At fifty-five I know that at 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 123 

ten I came into contact with one of 
these born teachers. I doubtless ex- 
aggerated what he knew, but forty- 
five years have increased rather than 
diminished my confidence in what 
he taught. I do not know, I never 
shall know, who are the best teachers 
at Bryn Mawr; but you know, now 
and for life. There may be a dozen 
reasons for not keeping this or that 
inspiring teacher in this or that col- 
lege; but I suspect that in judging 
the equipment of the college teacher 
to-day we overrate learning, espe- 
cially the learning revealed (or con- 
cealed) in research, and underrate 
that personal magnetism, and that 
love of imparting without which no 
teacher can wake his pupils into in- 
tellectual enthusiasm. 

The second discovery of the com- 



124 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

mittee on improving instruction 
was the discovery that we might im- 
prove instruction by giving less of 
it. The time the student spent in the 
lecture room was, in many cases, 
out of all proportion to the time he 
spent in studying. We, who over- 
emphasize research into any corner 
of truthhowever remote, do not suf- 
fer our undergraduates to work out 
their problems by and for them- 
selves, — perhaps I should say, do 
not require them to do so. The lec- 
turer under the elective system is 
never sure that his pupils have done 
before his lecture what they must do 
if his lecture is to be understood. 
Therefore he is tempted to take on 
himself their work, and they are 
tempted more than ever to let him 
do it. Yet no strong and fine results 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 125 

can come from intellectual spoon- 
feeding. The student of high quality 
andindependent spirit rebels against 
instruction one quarter of which is 
enough to put his mind on the right 
path, and the whole of which may set 
it obstinately on the wrong one . An 
old New England watchmaker, when 
somebody took him a fine Swiss 
watch for repairs, observed, ''I can 
take her apart, and I can put her to- 
gether again, and she may go ; but 
somehow it seems as if the man that 
made one of them fine watches put 
in somethin' of his own that / can't 
understand ; so I most ginerally give 
'em a few drops of ile and lay 'em by 
in a drawer for two or three weeks, 
and most on 'em kind o' think it out 
for themselves." 

*' Appreciation of beauty may be 



126 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

catching,'^ said Mr. James Croswell, 
*'but you can't vaccinate with it"; 
and Mr. James Croswell says many 
wise things. The nobly infectious 
teachers are few, but they are the 
teachers, and have been, since teach- 
ing and time began. Pedagogy may 
make almost any intelligent man a 
teacher of a sort, just as training 
will make almost any musical man 
a pianist of a sort. Teachers and 
pianists are made as well as born ;but 
it is the born teachers, not the mere 
middlemen, who interpret literature 
— literature and life. To be inspiring 
you must yourself be inspired. What 
are the tradition and the spirit of any 
college but the tradition and the 
spirit of a few great teachers whose 
liveshavebeen wrought into the very 
fibre of it, who have been and are the 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 127 

quintessence of it, till it has become 
the quintessence of them, the pre- 
cious life-blood of those master- 
spirits ** embalmed and treasured up 
on purpose to a life beyond life." 
Living or dead it is they who give 
each college its own meaning, who 
put into it something of their own 
that no outsider can understand. It 
is they also who, however varied 
their manifestations, reveal one and 
the same thing. For just as St. 
Francis, and Luther and Wesley alike 
speak religion; just as Homer and 
Dante and Shakspere alike speak 
poetry ; just as Aristotle and New- 
ton and Pasteur alike speak science, 
so do these men and women alike 
speak that mighty truth in which 
religion and poetry and science are 
blended, the truth made manifest, 



128 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

as nowhere else in the world, at 
college. 

To this truth, you, if I may con- 
tinue Mr. CroswelFs figure, have 
been exposed for four years. Now 
four years is a large fraction of any 
life, and scarcely less than a tenth of 
the best years in a long life. With 
some of you it is a much larger frac- 
tion than this: for 

*• 'Tis some to the pinnacle, some to the deep 
And some in the glow of their strength to sleep." 

Every one of you who thinks must 
have asked herself again and again 
why she spends four of the most 
glorious years of her youth at col- 
lege ; why she came at all, and hav- 
ing come why she did not — like 
many of her friends — merely sam- 
ple college life, thus make herself a 
Bryn Mawr woman for all time, and 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 129 

*^conie out " into that society which 
is eagerly awaiting her. Christopher 
North asks whether there is * *a book 
in verse or prose, in any language, 
in which human life is not likened 
to a river or a river to human life." 
The figure occurs, he says, ** often 
in Hoyle on Whist . . . and once at 
least in every page of every volume 
of sermons entered at Stationers' 
Hall." Now a figure so prevalent, so 
epidemic as that, may be tiresome, 
but must be more or less true, and 
like all true figures may be revived 
even when worked half to death. 
President Hyde of Bowdoin College 
likens the college years to a dam- 
ming of the stream, a check for the 
accumulation of power, — power to 
turn the great wheels of life. Have 
you accumulated power? The pleas- 



130 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

ure of it all is plain enough — the 
friendships, the joy of learning, the 
keen delight of growth, a delight so 
sensitive as to be half yearning and 
pain, as many delights are, but a 
delight which she who has tasted 
cannot forego. These things are in 
themselves a partial justification. So, 
too, is learning. Yet at the risk of 
disgracing myself here for ever, I 
confess that I have my intermittent 
doubts as to much which passes for 
learning in the University world to- 
day. Every particle of truth deserves 
respect ; every honest bit of research 
trains the industry and much re- 
search trains the intellect: but I am 
Philistine enough to believe that the 
industry and the intellect deserve 
better training than they get in some 
graduate work. I was once brought 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 131 

suddenly from my bedroom in the 
evening to my front door. ' 'Who is 
there?" said I. ^'Tm a Sophomore 
in Harvard College," said a voice. 
* 'Fm being initiated into the Dickey, 
and before to-morrow noon I must 
know how many girls were expelled 
from Radcliffe in the years 1908 and 
1 909 , and the sum total of their ages ; 
and before to-morrow noon I 've got 
to count all the steps in the Tou- 
raine." Never before had I seen so 
clearly the resemblance between in- 
itiation and research. To me the 
Philistinism seems often in the re- 
search itself — secluded concentra- 
tion of the mind for years on a pro- 
blem of small importance, till, after 
long grubbing the chrysalis splits 
and the doctor bursts upon the 
world. In that world he has no se- 



132 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

elusion and constantly broken con- 
centration. He must mark the 
themes, we will say, of a hundred 
crude and riotous Freshmenand hold 
their attention in the class. They 
have no use for his specialty, and he 
through force of habit yearns for it, 
and in fear of losing it would teach 
it at once. He is a misfit except at 
the top, and the top is occupied by 
a perfectly healthy gentleman w^ho 
means to stay there. Whether even 
at the top he would keep his bal- 
ance is extremely doubtful; for he 
has built high on a narrow base and 
isheavilyloadedononeside. I speak 
of the men and women who have 
dulled rather than sharpened their 
powers; of some investigators, not 
of all. A man whose doctor's thesis 
concerns the influence of Spenser or 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 133 

of Milton is not unfitting himself for 
the society of his young pupils to be; 
but your thoroughgoing modern 
scholar, as I perceive him from my 
position outside of the paling, re- 
spects one truth about as much as 
another. Germany knew a time 
when scholars who believed that 
Athene in the Eumenides of ^^schy- 
lus appeared in a chariot would not 
speak to those who believed that she 
did not. The question whether it was 
Langland, or Langley or somebody 
else who wrote what we commonly 
call ''Piers Plowman," the question 
whether it was or was not Richard 
RoUe who wrote ' * The Prick of Con- 
science" — questions to which one of 
the most brilliant professors in this 
country and one of the ablest grad- 
uates of this college have given their 



134 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

best powers, are to the American lit- 
erary scholar of to-day exciting, even 
burning questions . Would they have 
been burning questions to Emerson 
or to Charles Eliot Norton or to Ben- 
jamin Jowett? 

Harvard and Chicago are justly 
proud of Professor Manly's work; 
Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe are justly 
proud of Miss Allen's. The question 
of utility is not the only question for 
a scholar; there may be a noble dis- 
regard of utihty in the self-reward- 
ing exercise of the mind. Severe 
training, too, is the best antidote to 
the vague and the sloppy. In the 
same college class with Charles Eliot 
Norton was Francis James Child, 
who held himself and his pupils to 
close and detailed study as their sal- 
vation. I shall never forget his dis- 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 135 

gust when a student proposed as a 
subject for an honor thesis **Was 
Hamlet mad?" or the shght value 
he put on undergraduate writing, 
which no doubt is often pretentious 
and shallow. Yet, though he arrived 
after twenty years of theme-marking 
at the apparent belief that creative 
work is a thing of the past, and that 
we should hold students to a close 
study of the past rather than encour- 
age them in chasing ideas of their 
own, I think he was half wrong. * *I 
desire in this life," said Browning, 
*'to live and just write out certain 
things which are in me, and so save 
my soul." The glory of a college is 
in its creative scholars (whether the 
creation be scientific or imaginative, 
chemistry or poetry). To the crea- 
tive scholars the University should 



136 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

offer every aid of generous and 
searching criticism, and of whole- 
souled encouragement. They will be 
few, and beside their successes we 
count many partial failures : 

••Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. 
Or what 's a heaven for ? " 

One of our dangers is in subsidizing 
uninspired graduate work, in con- 
structing what Doctor Crothers has 
called intellectual Dreadnoughts, 
that cannot be got out of the dock — 
in keeping at the University men 
who have eaten of the lotus and 
forget return. For these men the 
years of study have not dammed the 
stream, they have stagnated it. 

When Mr. Roosevelt declared that 
the University should encourage a 
few productive — not annotative — 
scholars, he declared also that the 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 137 

great body of students it should train 
not as scholars but as citizens. One 
might express the same idea differ- 
ently by saying that its scholarship 
should maintain a human side. The 
best kind of scholar is ipso facto a 
good citizen, diffusing culture and 
taste without conscious effort. Col- 
lege training should visibly polish 
the mind. I say ** should" rather 
than **does," because now and then 
it does not: that is, the gain in polish 
is small for the time it covers. Pos- 
sibly Professor Shaler was right in 
saying that we have more ' *peasant- 
minded students" than of old: at all 
events, whether through decay of 
classical learning or not, some men's 
taste shows about as little of their 
college training as their memories 
disclose of their Greek or their Alge- 



138 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

bra. * * They come," as Mrs. Brown- 
ing would say, ' * and eat their bread 
and cheese on the high altar." 
** Evelyn Hope," wrote a student in 
the Harvard Graduate School at an 
examination in Browning, '* Evelyn 
Hope is the monologue of a mature 
man in the presence of a young lady's 
corpse." The worst of it is he was 
right. Evelyn Hope is a monologue, 
and the remains, as he might have 
said, are not absent. As a matter of 
fact he knew a great deal about 
Browning, ■ — and knew it (literally) 
as a matter of fact. The puzzle is that 
a man could come through any col- 
lege (what his college was I do not 
remember), and love any poetry, 
and show so little of either poetry or 
college. The queer thing about taste, 
you know, is that at any one point 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 139 

in our ascent we look on those below 
us as crude, though just where we 
were a year ago, and on those above 
us as finical, though just where we 
shall be a year hence. Still we do 
recognize a natural progress in the 
taste of every educated man, — until 
such a sentence as I have quoted 
strikes us like a blow. When could 
the author's taste have been worse? 
When can it be better? How has he 
justified by culture his college years? 
Again we have a right to look to 
college men and women for leaders 
in thought and action, for executive 
heads, whether in the learned pro- 
fessions or in business or in phi- 
lanthropy. Here, on the whole, the 
college does better than one who 
knows its methods would expect. In 
every city, and many a town, are 



140 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

persons who justify their college 
years by leadership. What must you 
do to be leaders? 

There are two kinds of executive, 
the one who stimulates and the one 
who accomplishes. A clever woman 
once said of the Reverend Edward 
Everett Hale: *'I know he doesn't 
finish much, but he has cut and 
basted more things than anybody 
living." His was the leadership of 
what President Eliot calls the ''fer- 
tile and adventurous thinker." But 
his leadership was incomplete: to 
adopt his method you need his mag- 
netism, his touch of genius; other- 
wise 'you will become a mere inac- 
curate disturber of society. We hear 
a great deal about ''initiative" and 
"constructive imagination." Doc- 
tor Hale had both, and probably 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 141 

never stopped to consider whether 
he had either. He, hke the other 
great teachers of whom I have 
spoken, could inspire because him- 
self inspired; but for one such divine 
cutter and baster there are several 
hundred who, with no inspiration, 
and with no knowledge that they 
have no inspiration, unsteady their 
associates by an irrepressible initia- 
tive without wisdom. I have seen 
them in colleges, vehemently urg- 
ing half-baked plans, squandering 
their own energy and that of their 
colleagues — well-intentioned, of- 
ten high-minded nuisances. This 
is but pseudo-leadership. Still more 
trying is that other pseudo-leader- 
ship which with great stir involves 
neighbors and friends in a big, com- 
plicated scheme, and then stands 



142 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

from under, leaving the hard work 
and probable failure to a lower order 
of mind. This is one danger of aca- 
demic self-satisfaction. The true 
leader not merely plans, but exe- 
cutes, nor does he as a rule make a 
noise. Rather, as Mrs. Browning 
said of her husband, he works ' * as 
the cedars grow, upward, and with- 
out noise, and without turning to 
look on the darkness'* he causes 
upon the ground. I have known 
men and women who thought they 
were executive when they were sim- 
ply cross, — as if browbeating were 
efficiency. Sometimes they fright- 
ened people into neglecting other 
people in their behalf, and got things 
in which they were interested done 
first. Thus, looked at narrowly, 
they seemed more efficient than 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 143 

they were ; looked at in their rela- 
tion to their surroundings, they 
put back as many good things as 
they advanced. The efficient man 
is not the man who grabs another 
man's clerk for his own statistics but 
the man who uses his own clerk and 
himself to the best advantage. He 
gets the best yield out of mind and 
body with the least wear and tear, 
as Mr. Frederick Taylor does in the 
business world. Nagging women (I 
hasten to say that this applies also to 
men) are never executive, though 
they commonly think they are, and 
succeed in making others think so. 
Some of the best executives I have 
ever seen have moved in a mysteri- 
ous way their wonders to perform, 
never hurrying, rarely impatient, 
not too proud to associate with de- 



144 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

tail, yet able, courteously as it were, 
to make detail know its place. Effi- 
ciency rendered fertile by education 
is a great need of our time and of 
every time. As heads of families, as 
workers in the unending fight 
against the filth and the vice of our 
cities, as antidotes to the well-mean- 
ing headlessness of those good men 
and women who mangle where they 
would mend, you are needed each 
and all. Here every bit of your col- 
lege training will help you, if you 
never parade it, but let it silently 
do its appointed work. In every 
problem I have suggested there is 
enough to keep you humble; to him 
who sees clearly, the struggle is 
rather for self-respect against hu- 
miliation. It is not merely that the 
stone you roll up hill shall not roll 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 145 

down, but that it shall not crush you 
as it rolls. The problem of the city, 
for instance, is so vast, so multifold, 
so rankly self-renewing — thousands 
of children born of vice, in vice, and 
to vice, without a sign of hope ex- 
cept that seed which, hidden deep 
in every human soul, may struggle 
up to purity and beauty like the 
pond lily out of the slime; children 
born to recklessness, covetousness, 
and brutal hate; children whose 
mortality which we are striving to 
decrease may be their one true bless- 
ing. How trivial our training seems 
in the face of this, for who are we ? 
Yet sadly enough, it is in the face 
of this that some of us take pride 
in thinking who we are, and thank 
God we are not as other men, and 
patronize the poor. Mrs. Maud Bal- 



146 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

lington Booth tells of a rector who 
when he preached in prison, where 
attendance, even at chapel, is pre- 
scribed, began with the cheerful 
greeting: ''My dear convicts, I am 
glad to see so many of you here this 
afternoon." Not long since, a woman 
of distinguished family and high 
ideals gave a talk to the mothers of 
a boys' club. At intervals she would 
stop and say to the presiding officer: 
* * Do you suppose they understand 
me? " She said it so audibly that the 
presiding officer, to save everyone's 
feelings, answered at last, as audibly: 
'*0h! yes. These women were not 
all born in America, but they all 
understand English." ''Oh! I don't 
mean that!^^ the speaker retorted; 
and after the address one woman was 
heard to remark: "Some folks is 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 147 

afraid other folks won't know what 
their names is." 

I speak of this because you and I 
alike belong to colleges which are 
believed by many other colleges to 
think of themselves more highly 
than they ought to think. President 
Hadley's immortal words, * * You can 
always tell a Harvard man, but you 
can't tell him much," will serve for 
my college; you best know whether 
anyone has discovered an epigram 
for yours. How far the charge is just, 
you for Bryn Ma wr and I for Harvard 
may not be in a position to say, but 
one thing is certain: nothing is surer 
death to our large efficiency than ac- 
ademic pretension. Nor is anything 
less excusable. Who feels import- 
ant in the presence of the ocean, or 
of the night sky, or on the prairie, 



148 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

or at the foot of Pikes Peak? Whose 
accomphshments seem to signify 
when he or she has had the merest 
ghmpse into the infinity of learning? 
To justify our college we must work 
not only hard, but humbly. It is the 
universal feeling of those who throw 
themselves into democratic fellow- 
ship that the reason why it is more 
blessed to give than to receive is be- 
cause he who unreservedly gives his 
whole self receives more than he 
gives. I speak of this because we 
hear in colleges so much about self- 
development. Philosophers and 
evenministersare'constantlypreach- 
ing it, and in preaching have 
achieved the ugly words ' 'selfhood" 
and ' *selfness." In a sense it is right, 
no doubt. You have been here, if 
you please, for self-development; 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 149 

making five talents ten has been, and 
still is, commended: but you have 
not been self-developed for your- 
selves, nor are the ten talents much 
better than five, or even than one, 
if they also are kept in a napkin. 
The only valuable leisure class is a 
leisure class that works; the only 
valuable self-development is the self- 
development for somebody else. 
And here is another of the torment- 
ing problems of life: to keep our 
maximum efficiency we must have 
regular habits of recreation; to keep 
regular habits of recreation we must 
again and again, like the priest and 
the Levite, pass by on the other side. 
In the Civil War Governor John A. 
Andrew of Massachusetts deliber- 
ately worked at a rate that killed him. 
The emergency called, and he an- 



150 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

swered as truly as Colonel Shaw who 
was killed in battle. Arnold Toynbee 
died young. I saw him but once, 
not many months before his death, 
and the frightful signs of overwork 
in his face I shall never forget; to him 
the social problems of England were 
as truly an emergency as to Gover- 
nor Andrew the Civil War. William 
Baldwin, the finest example I know 
of the business man who lived up to 
his best faith, and never suffered his 
ideals to get shopworn, died at forty- 
one. On every side we hear the call 
of the emergency. Shall we keep on 
heeding these calls, when we our- 
selves feel, as a friend of mine says, 
**like the latter end of a misspent 
life ?" Shall we always cry: ^' Lord, 
here am L Send me I " even unto 
death? Or shall we say: ''I went last 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 151 

time. It is somebody else's turn. I 
can do twice as much in the long run 
if I do nine tenths as much now" ? 
I once put a drop of ammonia into 
my eye and rushed madly for the oc- 
ulist. I was in agony; he, I under- 
stand, was at breakfast. In due and 
deliberate time he came. To me 
there was'an emergency; to him there 
was none. How many undisturbed 
breakfasts would he have taken if 
he had always made others' emer- 
gencies his own? He could do little 
for me but relieve my mind, and 
before I went another man might 
come, and then another — as not 
only doctors but deans will testify. 
Many disturbed meals diminish effi- 
ciency. Was he right? To this day 
I do not know. The self-preserver 
and self-developer, the man who 



152 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

feels his responsibility to his own life , 
and keeps that life sedulously for 
family use may be more admirable 
than the man who leaves wife and 
six children in a desperate effort to 
save from drowning somebody who, 
so far as the world can see, had bet- 
ter be drowned. Every bit of logic 
at my command goes to prove him 
more admirable, even kinder, and in 
a far-reaching sense, more unselfish. 
Yet the sudden disregard of every- 
thing but the one thing needful, 
the quick spring to the sound of the 
trumpet, even the deliberate ignor- 
ing of a thousand ties for the least 
of these little ones when deep calleth 
unto deep, this is what quickens the 
heart of man. The words ** Whoso 
saveth his life shall lose it" find their 
answer even in the weakest of us all: 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 153 

"If you loved only what were worth your love, 
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you : 
Make the low nature better by your throes I 
Give earth yourself.' 

The trouble, I suppose, is not in 
the theory of self-development, but 
in the state of mind which is fostered 
by constant calculation of effect, in 
the peril of accepting the means as 
the end, in the threatening of moral 
valetudinarianism, of nervous pro- 
stration of the soul. Lavish and in- 
discriminate alms -giving we now 
know to be bad; yet we still see what 
stung John Boyle O'Reilly into his 
denunciation of 

*'The organized charity, scrimped and iced 
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ." 

He was wrong, but wrong with a 
touch of right. You cannot better 
justify your college years than by 



154 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

giving political economy more heart 
and charity more head. 

One of the best gifts that a college 
can bestow is the power of taking a 
new point of view through putting 
ourselves into another's place. To 
many students this comes hard, but 
come it must, as they hope to be 
saved. Every year I have a class, of 
some thirty picked men, in writing; 
and nearly every year I find in that 
thirty a little knot of four or five who 
admire each other's work and carp 
at that of anybody else, who are a 
bit supercilious, without knowing 
it, about writing which will find its 
way to the public as soon as theirs, 
but which is not for the time being 
fashionable in that particular college 
magazine to which they are attached, 
— a magazine that would serve its 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 155 

purpose much better if its taste were 
more catholic. We study writing in 
college partly to learn it ourselves, 
partly to render our appreciation 
not only more accurate but wider. 
To the American world the name of 
Charles Eliot Norton stands for all 
that is fastidious, even for what is 
over-fastidious; but Charles Eliot 
Norton's collection of verse and 
prose called **The Heart of Oak 
Books" shows a catholicity which 
few of his critics could approach, a 
refined literary hospitality not less 
noteworthy than the refined human 
hospitality of his Christmas Eve at 
Shady Hill. As an old man this in- 
terpreter of Dante saw and hailed 
with delight the genius of Mr. Kip- 
ling. If you leave college without 
catholicity of taste, something is 



156 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

wrong either with the college or with 
you. 

As in literature, so in life. The 
greatest teachers — even Christ him- 
self — have taught nothing greater 
than the power of seeing with the 
eyes of another soul. * 'Browning," 
said a woman who loves poetry, 
** seems to me not so much man as 
God. " For Browning, beyond all men 
in the past century, beyond nearly 
all men of all time, could throw him- 
self into the person of another. 

**God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
One to show a woman when he loves her," 

said this same great poet, writing to 
his wife. But Browning had as many 
soul-sides as humanity. Hence it has 
been truly called a new life, like con- 
version, or marriage, or the mystery 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 157 

of a great sorrow, — a change and a 
bracing change in our outlook on 
the whole world, to discover Brown- 
ing. The college should be our 
Browning, revealing the motive 
power of every life, the poetry of 
good and bad. It is only the '* little 
folk of httle soul" who come out of 
college as the initiated members of 
an exclusive set. Justify yourself and 
your college years by your catholic 
democracy. 

I have spoken of some justifica- 
tions of these four years. Nobody 
knows better than I that not one of 
them is new, for there are no new 
justifications. When an old neigh- 
bor of mine in the woods had a vio- 
lent cough and someone said to him: 
*'Why don't you take one of these 
cough mixtures?" he retorted: 



158 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

''What is there in any on 'em that 
there ain't in molasses ? " That is my 
feeHng about novelties on occasions 
like this. As Professor Copeland 
would put it, creative writing at such 
a time is * ' like wringing water out 
of a dry grindstone." Yet the story 
of love is not the only old story that 
is eternally new; and in the larger 
sense the story of your college is a 
story of love — of love and of faith, 
and of hope and of courage. The 
different parts of what I have said 
may not seem to cohere; but as I see 
them they do belong together, and 
the sum and substance of them all 
is this: It is the duty of the college 
not to train only, but to inspire; to 
inspire not to learning only, but to a 
disciplined appreciation of the best 
in literature, in art, and in life, to a 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 159 

catholic taste, to a universal sym- 
pathy. It is the duty of the student 
to take the inspiration, to be not 
disobedient to the heavenly vision, 
but to justify four years of delight, 
by scholarship at once accurate and 
sympathetic, by a finer culture, by 
a leadership without self-seeking or 
pride, by a whole-soul democracy. 
How simple and how old it all is I 
Yet it is not so simple that any 
one man or woman has done it to 
perfection ; nor so old that any one 
part of it fails to offer fresh pro- 
blems and fresh stimulus to the 
most ambitious of you all. Mr. D. L. 
Moody used to preach that the gift 
of salvation was not generally ac- 
cepted, because men would not be- 
lieve that God may be had for the 
asking and even for the receiving. 



160 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

*'As if," he said, ''a teacher had of- 
fered his watch successively to a 
whole class of boys, and when one 
took it, the others cried out : 'I'd 
have taken it if I had thought he 
really meant to give it.'" Nothing 
is harder than to take freely and 
eagerly the best that is offered us, 
and never turn away to the pursuit 
of false gods. Now the best that is of- 
fered in college is the inspiration to 
learn, and having learned, to do : — 

**Friends of the great, the high, the perilous years, 
Upon the brink of mighty things we stand — 
Of golden harvests and of silver tears, 
And griefs and pleasures that like grains of sand 
Gleam in the hour-glass, yield their place and 
die." 

So said the college poet. He spoke 
to young men, but the spirit of which 
he spoke belongs to young women 
also : — 



AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 161 

"The portals are open, the white road leads 

Through thicket and garden, o'er stone and sod. 
On, up 1 Boot and saddle I Give spurs to your 

steeds I 
There 's a city beleaguered that cries for men's 
deeds. 
For the faith that is strength and the love that 
is God I 
On, through the dawning 1 Humanity 

calls I 
Life 's not a dream in the clover ! 
Onto the walls, on to the walls, 
On to the walls, and over." 

*'Art without an ideal," said a 
great woman, * 4s neither nature nor 
art . The question involves the whole 
difference between Phidias and Mme. 
Tussaud." Let us never forget that 
the chief business of college teach- 
ers and college taught is the giving 
and receiving of ideals, and that the 
ideal is a burning and a shining light, 
not now only, or now and a year or 
two more, but for all time. What 



162 COLLEGE TEACHERS 

else is the patriot's love of country, 
the philosopher's love of truth, the 
poet's love of beauty, the teacher's 
love of learning, the good man's love 
of an honest life, than keeping the 
ideal, not merely to look at, but to 
see by ? In its hght, and only in its 
light, the greatest things are done. 
Thus the ideal is not merely the most 
beautiful thing in the world; it is the 
source of all high efficiency. In 
every change, in every joy or sorrow 
that the coming years may bring, 
do you who graduate to-day remem- 
ber that nothing is so practical as a 
noble ideal steadily and bravely pur- 
sued, and that now, as of old, it is 
the wise men who see and follow the 
guiding star. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



ROUTINE AND IDEALS 

By Le Baron R. Briggs, President of Rad- 

cliffe College. 

i6mo, $i.oo, net. Postage 9 cents. 

" Common sense enriched by culture de- 
scribes everything which Dean, or, as he 
ought now to be called. President, Briggs 
says or writes. The genius of sanity, sound 
judgment, and high aim seems to preside 
over his thought, and he combines in an un- 
usual degree the faculty of vision and the 
power of dealing with real things in a real 
way." — The Outlook, New York. 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND 
CHARACTER 

By the Author of " Routine and Ideals.'* 
i6mo, $1.00, net. Postage 8 cents. 

" With the soundest good sense and with 
frequent humorous flashes. Dean Briggs 
takes students and parents into his confi- 
dence, and shows them the solution of col- 
lege problems from the point of view, not 
of the 'office' but of a very clear-think- 
ing, whole-souled man in the ' office ' " — The 
Worlds Work, New York. 

pousl)ton JHifflin Companp, f ttljlidjerfi 

BOSTON and new YORK 



THE LIFE OF 

ALICE FREEMAN PALMER 

By GEORGE HERBERT PALMER 

*' There could hardly be imagined a more wholesome 
life story than this. One wishes it might go into a 
million homes and find its way into the hands of every 
college student." — Chicago Standard. 

" Certain to be one of the notable books of the year. 
. . . As fascinating as a novel." — Springfield Re- 
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" To those who knew and loved Mrs. Palmer this book 
will be a friend ; to those who knew her not it will be 
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" A work of love and sympathy, of personal and intel- 
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at the same time with a detachment that permits him 
to view and to describe Mrs. Palmer from far as well 
as from near." — Boston Transcript. 



With portraits and views. Square crown 8vo, ^1.50 net. 

Postage 15 cents. 



HOUGHTON Y^m^ '^ BOSTON 

MIFFLIN 1^?^ "^^^ 

COMPANY fcliio NEW YORK 




}€T 18 19tl 



one copy del. to Cat. Div. 



OCT 1? "" 



